


Reap the Whirlwind

by Stealth_Noodle



Category: Final Fantasy IV
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Backstory, DS Canon, Dark, Mid-Canon, Mind Control, Multi, Not After Years Compliant, POV Nonhuman, Pre-Canon, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000, Xeno, oh shit it's a long final fantasy fic get in the car!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-06
Updated: 2011-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-25 18:49:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stealth_Noodle/pseuds/Stealth_Noodle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wrath of Barbariccia, from origin to end. Featuring crystals backstory and the dirty little secrets of Lunarian terraforming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fall

**Author's Note:**

> DS canon (mostly). Ignores The After Years.
> 
> Additional warnings for abuse and slavery.

The wind is wild and free, nameless and formless. It dances with sea and sand and breathes hungry life into flames; they are form, and it is frenzy. The wind is savage joy and gentle whim.

Into their vibrant chaos stumble fragile things seeking to shape the world. When the creatures erect shelters, the wind delights in tearing them apart, leaving only a few for the earth to swallow whole. The restless sea rides the wind over the shore to sweep away their structured fields. Fire rises from below to taste them and their works, and twines with the wind in ecstatic gluttony.

The creatures rise and fall and scatter, again and again and again. The world is good and familiar.

Above is an endless void that holds no interest for the wind. Here below, it has trees to rip from the earth, leaves to rustle, storms to whip over the coasts, hairs to sigh gently between. But one night a second moon intrudes above the horizon, tugging strangely at the tides. The wind chops its reflection on the waters to glittering pieces.

Strange and unwelcome, but ever out of reach, it shines its sickness in a mockery of flame. The wind continues dancing beneath and forgets that it was ever strange; the wind is unburdened by memory.

When a shining beast trespasses from the moon to the sky, the wind batters its sleek hide but cannot turn it away. Storms break against it like waves against the shore. The wind follows it furiously down until it halts, not quite upon the ground, and vomits forth tiny creatures. They are not unlike the wind's fragile, stubborn toys, but neither are they welcome; the wind circles the invaders slowly, fluttering through their garments, until momentum spirals it into a cyclone.

The earth yawns. The rivers rise. The deep fires flow from the planet's heart. What upsets their eternal balance will not be tolerated.

Their convergence shatters under a flash of light.

 

* * *

 

Everything is wrong. Everything is one place, one shape, wet and solid and dark, as if all the wind has been violently inhaled into a single lung. Gravity swallows; the world is upside-down, and the wind is buried, drowned, snuffed out.

The wind thrashes and drags after itself. Its edges tremble as if—

The wind is outside the wind. The wind is not the wind. Its howl is a true howl, born of someplace wet and dark, shaped by jaws instead of canyons and branches.

Inside—it has an inside and an outside now. Inside it is made of hard and soft pieces strung together under a canopy tighter than the sky. Inside it roils with thunder and bursts like rainclouds, pouring out the wetness that weighs it down.

It breathes. It breathes itself. It breathes what once was self and now is other. Time swallows.

Blinding light (it has eyes to blind). Cold grip (it has heft to chill and bind). Pounding inside (time chops it into regular pieces).

is the wind was the wind isn't doesn't _fit_

Something snaps around a narrow, important piece, and the wind is everything the wind should not be: solid, still, suppressed. A strange barrier cuts the light.

"She's secured."

Sound swallows. Meaning is bound so thickly to noise that neither can escape.

"Can she hear us?"

"Yes. She understands, and she will answer if we command it."

"She" swallows. These pieces are hers, and others are not; she is defined, paralyzed, flooded with sensations. Alien instincts urge her but cannot break her stillness.

The pieces that are not hers have their own names, trickling inexorably in: cold, pain, fear. Metal is the shining beast around her and the chill weight digging into her throat. She has a throat, hands, legs, a mouth, all the pieces that should belong only to her fragile playthings. Language fills her head to bursting. Her alien parts ache to rend themselves.

"And the others?"

"Already broken. We could cleanse this planet of its vermin before we complete another orbit around it."

"We have decided otherwise. We will wait."

She hates that their words drip through her unwanted ears into her unwanted brain and puddle into meaning. Beneath the prison of her skin, she itches to rip the flesh from their bones.

"For now."

The barrier falls aside and tugs at her throbbing head; it is a heavy thing hooked to her scalp. Searing bright light makes her aware of her eyelids as they struggle to close, but she can only stare, unfocused, as water wells up in her vision.

A muddled silhouette cuts a hole in the light. "Barbariccia. So named, so tamed."

The name swallows deepest of all. The wind is memory, desire, grief, a thousand new shackles raining down from the dark of her inchoate mind. She is not as she was. She will never again be as she was. "Never" is lightning striking ceaselessly at the base of her skull.

"They elders say that they are to be gifts, complementing the crystals. Surely we will not sleep long."

"No, we will surely not."

 

* * *

 

In darkness and silence and stillness, she waits. She cannot do otherwise.

She can feel the distant pulse of what should be her—a vast piece fixed in shape and space, but detached from Barbariccia. The name has burrowed deep and thrown up walls; she knows what is Barbariccia and what is not, as surely as she knows that the air around her is as bereft of her as she is of it.

She knows but does not understand.

When the invaders and their light return, the metal around her throat hooks deep into her flesh and drags her body toward them. Her struggles afford her no control and blast her bones with electric agony. She struggles regardless, until pain scrapes her mind raw and reduces her vision to a throbbing red darkness.

Her body stumbles forward, dragging her inside it. She feels time slicing her into pieces but cannot measure it. When the light shifts, the wind that she should be flows around her, and she howls until the metal cuts into her neck.

"Speak only when you are spoken to," says one of her captors, and the words stopper her throat. The pieces of Barbariccia that are hands end in long, curved claws; she imagines how it would feel to sink them into his face and watch his blood soak through his silver beard.

The talons on her feet furrow the earth, and the earth does not answer; her strange new insides twist at the thought that the earth might be as she is now, its essence ripped out and bound in flesh. The sea is near—she tastes its salt on her breath—but it does not reach out. If fire were still truly fire, she would feel it stirring deep underground, preparing to melt those who have ruined the world.

If the world were right, she could tear the hearts out of these creatures and bind them in eternal storms.

When her body halts, she is surrounded by the delicate things she used to blast effortlessly from the face of the world, as well as the even more fragile things that seek shelter inside them. Words flood in and boil away in her rage; she fights every frozen muscle and finds no freedom beyond a pain so great that it muddles her sense of shape.

Green light washes over her. She cannot turn her head or even flit her eyes to follow it, but she feels it pulse deeper than her heart. This is the greatest piece of what should be her; this is the grace and frenzy that would shatter the husk of Barbariccia if they reunited. It too is trapped in a shell; it too longs to dash its boundaries against hers until they are one again. _Break me,_ her frozen throat will not permit her to say, _and I will break you in return._

Her pain refuses to tear her apart.

One of the men (she knows even when she does not wish to) steps forward and attaches a chain to the metal at her throat, and fear forces clarity upon her.

 

* * *

 

For a long time, nothing changes.

The world around her changes—men age and die and pass her on like an heirloom, the armies she is pitted against bear new arms and flags, a pit in the ground becomes a cage becomes an oubliette—but she remains enslaved, unwhole. She is locked away, or she is the puppet of a man with a crown; she has nothing else to be.

She learns, or perhaps she becomes aware of knowledge poured inside her at her making. She learns the rules that bind her and the loopholes that never remain open for long. She learns society and hierarchy and that she wants no part of either. She learns to hate the darkness and silence of her cell almost as much as she hates the company of her captors. She learns that her hatred is a cyclone that can never touch down.

When she obeys without at least trying to struggle, because she is sick of the agony that dilates time, she learns to hate herself.

The last king had an insatiable appetite for her; this one has no stomach for it. Time settles over her in a dead calm as she waits, statue-still, in her oubliette, knowing that she will not stir until the kingdom is invaded or a new king prepares to take the crown. Misery is always with her, in memory and anticipation and every muscle that she cannot even twitch.

Blood gusts inside at her ears at the sound of footsteps. Each ascension ceremony is a fresh wound, even when she is not made to bleed. It is worse, sometimes, when she is not the only one unwilling.

But this is the same king scowling down at her through the barred hatch, older and fatter but still unable to look at her without contempt. He has brought no guards; he needs none. Her eyes ache in the torchlight.

He unhooks her chain from the hatch. A flick of his wrist, and she rises on the stale air of the dungeon. "Let yourself up," the king tells her; the lock has never been to confine her, but to keep curious humans out. Out of spite, she destroys the mechanism with a swipe of her claws and laughs brokenly as pain courses through her in response.

The collar constricts to silence her. "I'll hear nothing further from you," says the king, flexing his fingers to drag her up on the stone floor. His eyes avoid her, and Barbariccia wonders how it would feel to pluck them from his head or tear his sharp tongue from his mouth. His face would look better in tatters. "I require a diplomatic display. Move only as you're told."

Her legs carry her up from the dungeon into a chamber where nervous women fasten scarves and metal along her limbs. They are so small, these creatures; even the king's head is no higher than her chest. The hand of the woman who loops gold chains around her hips would not fill her mouth if she snapped it off at the wrist.

The king watches, face impassive, as the women drag combs through her hair. "Remain here until you are summoned. Be silent." He unhooks the chain from her collar and loops the metal around his hand. Even this is unnecessary; his power flows from blood, and blood alone. Barbariccia eyes the veins in his throat and imagines his life spraying out over the walls.

He leaves. The women leave. This room is her cell now, as every other room has been. The night breeze flows in through the only window and brushes against her like a hungry cat. Hairs prickle along her flesh; this is the closest she can come to a response.

A sharp pain bites at the hollow of her throat, dragging her the short distance to a curtained arch. A deep ache rolls down her arms, forcing them to gather the air and blow the curtains apart. Her legs draw her through the space created into a grand hall crowded with long tables, lit red by clusters of torches. She cannot reach out to the fire; it could not answer if she did.

The air stinks of meat, both cooked and living. Beyond a field of human faces, the king sits at the largest table, flanked by a younger man and a human encased in black metal. Barbariccia's mind tenses along with her body, alert for opportunities.

"Dance," the king commands.

Her movements are a mockery. No matter how swiftly she turns, no matter how furiously her hair whips after her, the wind remains outside and beyond her, inert. Her chains clatter. If the world were right, she would splinter their tables, flay them to the bone, raise a tempest of their blood. Let the king see if his blood still commands her when it congeals with a thousand commoners'.

When she nears the king, a twist in her spine reduces her to sluggish writhing.

"Remarkable," says the man behind the black metal. The firelight licks a ruddy glow over his armor; the true fire would consume him. "Did I not see the fiend before me now, I would never have believed such a thing could be tamed."

"Such is the glory of Fabul." The king crooks his finger, and the collar hooks into the hollow of Barbariccia's throat, forcing her to kneel at his feet. She makes no effort to smooth the hatred from her face. "We are masters of the wind and conquerors of its demon. Your Baron may dream of flight, but only Fabul shall achieve it."

The stranger's cold metal hand cups her chin. If the world were right, she could impale him with the shattered remains of his own armor. "I have no doubt of it. Is your demon only for display?"

She could drag him high into air too thin to fill his lungs. She could rip the breath and space from him and let his shriveled husk shatter on the rocks.

"For all but the royal line of Fabul." The king flexes his hand and forces Barbariccia into a bow so low that she tastes the filth of the floor.

This king has used her so only once. Others have imprisoned her in their own chambers and exercised their command of her each night; more have come in secret to her cage. Still more have recoiled from her inhumanity and left her locked away in the dark after the ascension ceremony, preferring her only as a weapon of war.

From the corner of her eye she sees what must be the king's son staring at her. His face is young, open, stupid; his eyes reflect majesty without malice. He sees more, and wrong.

Barbariccia catches his gaze and holds it like a leaf in an updraft, curving her lips.

 

* * *

 

In her oubliette, bare again of ornaments, she waits. Perhaps the prince will wait only an evening, or perhaps he will come to her years later, as a new king expected to assert his dominance. Down here, time is only the droning of her heart, and she has no patience for counting beats.

When footsteps scrape the stones above her, she stares intently up through the bars until the prince's young, stupid face appears between them. If he is any older, he is not much wiser.

"You're real," he breathes. "I don't understand why Father hides you." The torchlight shifts over his face as he kneels. "Can you speak?"

His blood resonates weakly, but the question is enough to open Barbariccia's throat. After a generation's silence, she struggles not to howl. "Only to one worthy of my voice. I have waited long for you."

A half-truth eases her speech. She still hates the mutations her thoughts endure between her mind and her mouth, hates the gap between whim and action. The wind was only ever the wind.

"For me?" His silken robe dips between the bars of the hatch. "What are—do you have a name?"

Humanity abhors the nameless. "Barbariccia."

His hand reaches down between the bars, and the gesture is release enough to let her rise. Dank air eddies at her feet and animates her hair. When she extends her hand, his breath hitches, but he does not flinch from her. She must be cautious; if she frightens him, he will still her.

"I see your shining heart, my prince." She traces his cheek with the pads of her fingers, muscles burning with the urge to flex her claws. "You are destined for greatness."

"I've always felt—Father has never understood." His tongue flicks over his lips. "Can you see my future?"

He is like one of the rotten old trees the wind used to pass over because there was no sport in ripping them from the ground, but Barbariccia must not be careless. She smiles with her lips together to hide her teeth. "I see your future and all of Fabul's. You bear this kingdom's fate upon your shoulders." Her hand brushes lower against his throat, where his soft skin would tear like a cobweb. "Fabul shrinks and will soon collapse."

Long ago, king after king used her for military conquest. Now they dread leading her into battle; even the most subtly ill-formed command allows her to slaughter Fabul's troops along with their foes, and modern monarchs have less stomach for sacrifice. Barbariccia has become a final resort, a pyrrhic victory when the enemy is already past the gates.

The prince understands none of this. His wide eyes gleam as she continues, "Your father drags Fabul with him into obscurity and ruin. But under your reign, Fabul will flourish from sea to sea, and beyond." Her voice is low; his ear tilts nearer to hear it. "Your destiny shines around you. If Fabul survives your father's reign, you will make an empire of her."

For a long moment he is silent, pulse quickening under her fingers. "Fabul and I must wait. My lord father is hale."

Another year, another decade, another generation—it should mean nothing to her, but patience has always been a cruelty inflicted on her, never something she has chosen for herself. She has no desire to understand why mortal creatures waste their brief lives on it.

"Your father will let Fabul crumble before his beard is gray." She slips her other arm through the bars and touches his chest lightly, a zephyr-tease. For this moment, at least, she does not hate that she has learned. "Your destiny waits to be claimed; if you wait, as well, you will never meet it."

His smooth brow creases. After a maddening pause, he asks, "Will you aid me?"

Her arms sink back between the bars, and Barbariccia exhales a long sigh that tousles the prince's hair. "I cannot. Your father bade me remain here until he summons me."

Muscles tense in his jaw. "As long as my father is king, you are his slave."

"As long as he lives."

He is silent again as his gaze slides down the long chain connecting her to the bars, then settles again on her face. When he speaks, his voice has hardened. "It isn't right for Father to imprison you like a beast."

Lightning crackles under Barbariccia's skin. "My captivity is what has brought this curse upon the royal line of Fabul. You must be the one to break it."

Silence. In the corner of her vision, she watches her hair undulate, red-gold in the torchlight. The prince's eyes are on her chain.

"I would be emperor," he says slowly. His eyes flit back to hers. "And I would have you as my empress."

"You honor me, my prince." The words coat Barbariccia's tongue; she nearly gags. "My heart yearns for the day of your ascension."

Her heart is a mindless throbbing knot of flesh, but she has learned what humans prefer to hear.

 

* * *

 

When he is gone, she sinks, stills, waits. She is always waiting. Anticipation stretches her past the point where she should snap.

Hours or weeks or years later, footsteps approach. Her thoughts whirl around the mistakes she might have made—perhaps she pushed too hard or not hard enough, because human desires require excruciating finesse—but the face that appears above the hatch is young, wild-eyed, spattered with wet darkness.

His blood resonates with undiluted ownership. She has nearly won.

"I've done," he babbles, "what I've, I don't know what now." The light flickers crazily as he fumbles the torch. "Please. Aid me?"

All her self-restraint scarcely keeps her from slamming the barred hatch upward into his face. She settles for shattering the lock as she rises and alights before him on the floor. He is so small; she kneels to give him the illusion of height.

His sticky hands grip her shoulders. "It was just," he whispers, though there is no one else around to keep his secrets from. "Tell me it was just."

"You did what was necessary," she replies, scarcely keeping her impatience out of her tone.

He shakes his head, and all of him shakes with it. "I was so angry. Everything he's—he let Mother die. I remember. I was not too young to understand." For a moment, his breaths begin to steady, but in a matter of heartbeats he collapses into noisy sobs.

Barbariccia has no time for this. She is too close. "You have nearly ended the curse upon your kingdom. You are the hero of Fabul."

"Am I? My lord father's blood is on my hands. He wouldn't _listen_."

Humans never live in the immediate moment; they carry the past inside like a parasite. What small piece of the prince isn't being eaten away by it is fixated pointlessly on the future. Barbariccia tries to nudge him back into focus: "Why did you come here, if not to begin your empire with me as your empress?"

The prince stiffens and pushes away from her.

"You made a murderer of me." His shaking has stopped; he is steadier now that he has found a target for his guilt. If he hadn't sobbed his throat raw, he might be shouting. "You've used me. You _monster_. I'll have nothing to do with you."

Her collar cracks.

Faster than her own thoughts, she swipes her claws through his neck—through blood that is no more than fluid now, through bone that cracks like glass. His head hits the floor and rolls over the uneven stones. His body slumps forward, spraying her with crimson.

Nothing binds her. No invisible hooks pull at her. Every electric twitch of her muscles is of her own making.

The air stirs around her, seeking reunion but rebuffed by her solidness. Her hair flows with it like a rising storm. Her body rises, as well, just high enough to leave behind the cut stone and spreading blood.

Her senses are sharper than silhouettes against lightning.

Damp and rot and iron and salt swirl on her breath. Exhaling enrages her; the air clings from the pits of her lungs to the tips of her teeth but cannot stay. She cannot be whole.

With a feral howl, she blasts a chasm into the ceiling and launches herself into the night sky. The moonslight silvers the stone of the castle. Around her, the cool winds gather.

Men spill from the towers to gape at her. She brews a storm above them, blotting out the moons and soaking the air with electricity. Only the winds near her know her, but they are enough; even small cyclones clear the ramparts.

Given time, she could level the castle and scatter its stones over the sea. Given time, she could blast the flesh from every human bone. But she feels the distant pull of the rest of herself, and she can think of nothing but becoming whole again.

The doors to the throne room splinter under gust and claw. Kings have kept Barbariccia close; in the this room she has always felt most keenly the self that is not Barbariccia. Even the kings who despised her presence kept that power close.

The throne cracks against the wall. Guards crack beside it. There is a door here, behind, that has no hope of withstanding her.

Inside are mirrors. Every surface reflects the pale gold of Barbariccia, streaked scarlet. At the center lies the shining green prison of everything that must break. Her blood resonates, pounding in time with the light.

"Mine," Barbariccia growls. A thousand lips echo her. "Me."

Footsteps thunder behind her. As she whirls, thrumming anew with fury, a company of men halts just inside the doorway. It has been too long since she slaughtered an army; even this sacrifice will not be enough to satisfy her. The winds spin tight around her body, twisting her hair into a golden cyclone. Her teeth gleam in her reflections.

Three men lunge at her feet-first, legs tense as blades. Her whirling hair repels them; their blood arcs after them as they crash backward into the walls.

Barbariccia's laughter echoes so wildly that she can almost pretend it is not channeled through a fixed throat. "Come forth! Perish in the undying storm!"

Instead they snap into a new formation, watching her warily. A gleaming darkness advances through their midst; the armored stranger has arrived to lend his sword, and no doubt to assert his kingdom's superiority, as well. She hates that she is aware of their politics.

"Surrender, demon!" he barks, and what can she do but laugh?

Barbariccia descends until the tip of her whirlwind shatters a tile in the mirrored floor. The men nearest it flinch. When the dark knight raises his sword, blade thickening black, she gathers the electricity in the air and blasts lightning into his helmet.

The air stinks of meat, and she breathes it greedily.

When the survivors make no move against her, she descends upon the crystallized essence of what she should be. Her claws skid along its facets without leaving a mark. Her teeth scrape uselessly as she finds that her fixed jaw is too small to consume it. Dashing the crystal against the floor cracks mirrors but accomplishes nothing.

In her rage, she realizes only belatedly that every piece of her that touched it burns like an explosion of needles. Her mouth and hands fall past agony into numbness.

Fresh pain explodes in her shoulder.

The men have found a grappling hook and caught it in her flesh. The pain is enough to stun her still as they yank the chain attached to it, slamming her down to the floor. They have more hooks.

She is tiring. She can tire. She can fall.

The fresh blood on her body is her own, and her mindless heart stutters in horror.

With a roar like a thunderclap, she channels lightning down the chain. The men holding it fall, smoking, and she snatches the chain to herself with her clumsy hands before more can grab hold. Her torn flesh screams at her.

When the next hook flies, she gathers the air and drills it through the mirror shards on its way to her attackers. A column is flung with bone-breaking force against the walls, lacerated. Here is a blink of an opportunity; she flies out on it faster than sound can follow, trailing blood.

Most of her is left behind to shine helplessly on the ruined floor. She will return to break it free. She will not orbit the empty future; she is now, and she survives.

Stars blur around her as she rises. She flies wild— _away, away, away_ —drunk on freedom, rage, and things that she has never learned to name. When the air thins, she spins and snaps and dives. The dark world streaks beneath her.

She comes to rest on a rocky shore by the silver-black sea. Her heart still thunders, but she has tired. Even her breaths are sluggish.

Blood still trickles from her shoulder. Ripping out the hook widens the flow and leaves her shaking. Her blood overlaps the humans', and there is no telling them apart.

She slashes her skin with her own claws, deeper and deeper, seeking gusts of wind or flashes of lightning, but there is only blood. Only blood and nausea and dizziness, only things she should not be.

Her weakness leaves her flat and listless on the rocks. She does not decline as humans do, but perhaps she can end like one. She hates the frisson of fear that climbs her spine.

Opportunities will not come to her here. Barbariccia watches the empty sea turn gray and pale and red, feels her flesh knit back together, and thinks.


	2. Gather

Kings spoke in front of her as if she were a piece of furniture. She knows the most powerful nations of the world, and it cannot be coincidence that Fabul is one of four. The world has changed since she last flowed freely above it, but from high above she can trace the outlines of the land and guess at where to search.

An expanse of earth teems with trees and crops, fertile beyond all the rest of the planet. At the edge of a dense forest, nestled against a flowering mountain range, stands the castle Troia. Human settlements spread beyond its walls, guarded only by the trees. They have forgotten to fear the sky.

Barbariccia lowers a thick ceiling of thunderheads over them. Lightning lashes out at the earth, splitting trees and burning the grass. She pulls as much air as she can into a funnel; it is just enough to rip apart a field of crops. The rain she withholds, scattering the clouds while they are still swollen with it.

She settles in the upper branches of a tree and waits. She must not tire herself.

Once the fires are out, the humans mill about inefficiently. Barbariccia waits, watching the gates of the castle. The sun cycles. When she considers how she might do more pressing damage to their fields, a crowd forms at last.

Something kindred emerges from the gates—bound in flesh that is warm brown where Barbariccia is pale gold, male-shaped and horned, but the collar is the same. The thin chain hooked to it is held by a small woman wearing a crown, flanked by a company of women in gleaming armor. Troia is Fabul is different robes.

This piece of what used to be the earth is marched away from Barbariccia's perch, into a scorched field. As ordered, he kneels and sinks his hands into the dirt. The wounded land turns dark, rich, fertile, radiating out from his touch; the charred remains of wheat stalks rise back to life and color.

If the world were right, the earth would crack open and swallow those who attempted to tame it. Barbariccia's claws dig deep into the branch beneath her.

When the group approaches the burnt land nearest her tree, she tenses into a crouch. "Again, Scarmiglione," says the human who must be queen, and her voice is very young; this close, she is clearly no more than a girl. Too young, perhaps, for heirs. The guard nearest her whispered into her ear before she spoke, no doubt because Troia has learned the same lessons as Fabul.

Scarmiglione ( _so named, so tamed,_ Barbariccia remembers, and bristles with hate) begins to revive the field. She directs a sharp breeze through his hair, and his gaze snaps upward to her tree as it trembles with the gathering winds. He must understand.

In the space of a breath, she takes flight and forms a cyclone around herself to snatch up the queen and half her guards. Barbariccia scarcely has the energy to control a storm of its magnitude; she twists and veers, ripping trees by their roots and buildings from their foundations, and it is all she can do to keep from devouring Scarmiglione. The wind never demanded precision of itself.

She does not have to maintain it for long. By the time the crowd has broken into a screaming panic, her eye catches the bright shattering of Scarmiglione's collar. Her hair uncoils as she lets the battered bodies fall to the ground.

The first guard to raise her sword is swallowed by a sinkhole. Scarmiglione understands.

Barbariccia alights beside him as the alarm ripples back toward the castle. A low noise mingling a growl and laugh rumbles steadily from his throat. Back arched and eyes rolling, he burrows his hands and feet into the churning earth. Hills burst; narrow chasms yawn; vines climb and cover houses until they collapse under the weight.

"Don't exhaust yourself," she warns, pricking his shoulder with her claws for emphasis. She knows what he feels and must not dwell on it.

His wild eyes roll toward her face. "The rest of—"

"I left mine behind in Fabul. We can't even touch it, and we're outnumbered."

"By these puny creatures?" He shifts the ground beneath a great oak to send it crashing down on the guards rushing toward them. The least agile are crushed. Already he is gray and trembling, though he does not seem aware of it.

Barbariccia grabs a fallen sword and slashes his chest with it.

For a moment he is stunned silent by the blood welling up along the line. Another wave of guards approaches, bearing chains and longbows. Barbariccia finds the energy to blow them back, but not before a tethered arrow finds her thigh. Her blood blossoms when she tears it out.

Scarmiglione is quaking, staring at the blood he has transferred to his fingers. An arrow glances from one of his horns. "Are we mortal?"

"I don't intend to find out." Barbariccia wraps herself around his back, avoiding a pair of horns, and coils her hair around them both. The winds whirl around them fast enough to deflect arrows, fast enough to raise them both above the trees. The shouts of the humans drown in the roar of the cyclone.

Already she is half-exhausted; they will not go far. The tip of her tornado scrapes the treetops, cutting an erratic path of destruction through the forest. Scarmiglione is tense as a fist against her; his sticky chest heaves under her arms, and his heart pounds so fast that each beat blurs into the next. Sweat slicks her grasp. They are horrifyingly alive.

Her cyclone skims over water (insensate beneath her, because the sea is named and tamed) and falls apart on the opposite shore, in a different forest. Scarmiglione lands prone on the dirt with her on his back. The woods teem with the noises of life: rustling, chirping, crawling, buzzing, layers upon layers free of the chatter of humanity. Long ago, all the world sounded like this.

Beneath her, Scarmiglione's breaths slow and calm as he inhales the scent of the untilled soil. The wind curls around her, quietly wild.

Her body reacts on its own, she has learned, electrifying itself regardless of her will. It reacts now to the heat of the body pressing against hers, to the kinship of misery and the memory of their dance.

Has she been lonely? It seems absurd even to consider, but the wind was never alone.

With a grunt of effort, she rolls Scarmiglione on his back. He looks up at her with vaguely curious annoyance until she straddles him.

"Why?" he asks, his tone halfway between weary and wary. "I've always hated it. Did they not demand this of you?"

"They did." She slides her hand down his chest, claws curved just enough to scratch, and feels his body react to her. "But now I am mine. This is _mine_."

He understands. When she bites his shoulder, his hands grab her hips with enough force to bruise.

They roll, scratching and biting and furrowing the earth with his horns. Her hair catches on the brush and rips it apart; her winds rattle the trees and rain down leaves, twigs, nests. Her body wants, so she lets it take. Pain-pleasure-need blazes through her senses and consumes her thoughts. Beneath the burning of her muscles and the splashing of her sweat and the hammering of her heart, she dives toward a frenzy almost as pure as dance.

She builds and crests and breaks atop him until they are both exhausted. Blood and dirt and woodland debris mingle on their skin. They are wet and sticky and inescapably organic, spent and finite and probably mortal. As long as aftershocks throb deep between her thighs, she doesn't have to think about any of that.

Their breaths are the most nearly human sounds in the forest, but she doesn't want to think about that, either.

Scarmiglione has rolled on his belly again to rest his face against the earth. His gaze is half-lidded, unfocused; a human would be asleep, but Barbariccia need never again watch a human do anything but bleed. She turns her face to the sky filtering in through the trees as the breeze combs the wreckage from her hair.

At length Scarmiglione speaks in a low rumble: "They were cautious with me and whispered of a great calamity in Fabul. When I saw you, I understood what must have happened."

Barbariccia grins to catch the sunlight on her teeth. "We were bound to bloodlines. Break the bond or end the line, and we are free."

"And the others? Has calamity struck Damcyan and Mysidia, as well?" He has heard the same unguarded chatter, drawn the same conclusions.

"Not yet. I found you first."

"You speak as if you have some plan."

She nods and turns on her side to watch his reaction. "When we were four and whole, these creatures were helpless. We will restore ourselves and wipe every trace of them from the face of the world."

For a long moment Scarmiglione is silent and unreadable, and his voice is flat when he replies, "Can we be restored? I've been trapped in his body for so long that I can scarcely remember what I am without it." He shifts away from her, churning the ground with the long horns growing from his sides. "We behave now as creatures of flesh."

She has little patience for herself in such a state, and less for him. "Then when we're as we should be, we'll forget what it was to be trapped in flesh."

He snorts. "And how will we accomplish that? You said yourself that we're unable to free the rest of ourselves."

She bristles. "On our own, yes, but we are still powerful. We will gather what we can of ourselves and combine our strength. Together, we will shatter the crystals and become whole again."

"As once we were," he says slowly, and his longing is too bright to bury under cynicism. "Would that such were possible."

"I will make it possible." The winds blast her agitation through the trees. "Do not doubt me. They have named me Barbariccia, and I will make Barbariccia the name they curse with their dying breaths."

He snorts again but does not argue. "Where would you go next, Barbariccia?"

 

* * *

 

It is some time before they go anywhere at all; they are tired and wounded and desperately glad not to be alone, and there is nothing human here to molest them. The trees shudder for Barbariccia when she passes and make her offerings of their leaves; the soil opens for Scarmiglione and cradles him in roots. They shape the forest through nurture and violence and whim, as once they shaped all things.

When the leaves redden, they rise to seek Damcyan. Scarmiglione detests flying but seems even less fond of Barbariccia's scorn; he is stiff and silent until her cyclone settles in the heart of the desert.

The birth of a sirocco greets her, plastering sand to the sweat that already beads her skin. She remembers what it was to sculpt the sand and twine with it in a dance of devastation that kept the desert pure; the distant stones of Damcyan mock her now.

She will not dwell on this. Here is a castle, surrounded by sand and nothing else. "We must draw them out," she says, "unless you have strength enough to swallow their kingdom whole."

Scarmiglione looks up in irritation from where the sand laps longingly against his legs. "With this fraction of my power? Why don't you first wear away every stone with your storms?"

"You're too weak, then." He annoys her less when he is incoherent beneath her, but this is neither the time nor the place for that. "We'll find a way to draw them out."

He glowers at her. "Do you expect the same trick to work twice? News passes between these kingdoms."

"Not well," she snaps, but already she has abandoned the idea. If the water were here, the castle would be nestled in a vast oasis. What, then, do these humans need with fire in the dry heat of the desert?

Beside her, Scarmiglione sinks up to his shoulders in the sands. A cactus grows before him with the speed of a man rising from a crouch.

Barbariccia slices the cactus in half with her claws. "Stop wasting your strength and _think_."

"I am." He gives her a reproachful look as the cactus regenerates and breaks out in little pink buds. "I think that we would be wise to offer an ultimatum."

Her lip curls back in a sneer. "You wish to parley with these creatures?"

"To threaten. We can wreck enough devastation between us to make them believe that we could level their castle if they refuse."

She scowls; the winds whip little storms between her feet and the ground. "And if they do not believe, we will have lost the element of surprise."

"We have lost it regardless. Even Troia was cautious before you arrived."

As long as the sky is open, she can fly away. She can leave him behind if necessary, and it would be his own fault for proposing a stupid plan.

 

* * *

 

She approaches atop her golden cyclone with Scarmiglione walking alongside below, half-buried in the sand, the great horns on his back poking up like sharks' fins. Storm clouds follow her like a cloak. If they would threaten, they must awe and terrify.

Humans gather on the ramparts beneath the darkening sky. Her muscles ache to rip them all apart with no regard for the consequences, but there must be more humans inside with hooks and chains. She is sick of bleeding for them.

Hovering above their heads, she speaks from the pit of her belly: "You hold an elemental force captive. Release it, or we will raze your pathetic kingdom."

Most of them scurry away, for weapons or reinforcement. "Now," Barbariccia adds. She blasts a turret with lightning and listens with satisfaction to their screams.

What emerges from the castle is not human but kindred: tall, hairless, very like a man except for his small crescent horns and his skin, which shades from a head the color of magma to ash-white limbs. His torso is covered by a red robe, not unlike what the men wear. Red and blue streaks branch like bright veins over what is visible of his pallor. A metal collar encircles his neck.

"That won't be necessary," he says, and Barbariccia realizes that she cannot trace him to his monarch; his collar has no chain. Her clouds groan with pent electricity as she scans for a target.

Sand crests like a tidal wave and carries Scarmiglione to top of the castle wall. The remaining humans scurry away from the edge as Barbariccia whips the sand into a flesh-abrading storm. "Bring us the one who binds him," he intones, "or you will all suffer."

What should be the fire glances between Barbariccia and Scarmiglione, gaze lingering on their bare throats. "Calm yourselves. I, Rubicante, royal strategist, would treat with you on behalf of Damcyan."

The sandstorm falters. Everything about him is wrong; there is no hunger crackling in his voice, no wild fury shining in his eyes. He is nearly a man.

"Your arrival is not unexpected," he continues; "Fabul and Troia have placed marks on the ones they call Barbariccia and Scarmiglione. The ruin you wrought was so great that they desire only your destruction, not your recapture."

That, at least, is right. Barbariccia descends, pulling her clouds down with her. "And let us now do the same to Damcyan. Where is the one who binds you?"

"We weren't finished trying the ultimatum," Scarmiglione rumbles as the remaining humans flee into the castle.

"I was."

Rubicante sighs so deeply that smoke rides out on his breath. "I've spent centuries transforming myself in their eyes from a beast to an equal. Did you not notice that I walk and speak freely?"

"I noticed that you are still their slave. You wear their collar." Barbariccia hates that she must find words for something so obvious. "You wear their _clothing_."

In a voice thick with contempt, Scarmiglione adds, "You let them civilize you."

"Yes," Rubicante replies crisply. "I take it that you did not."

Barbariccia whips her sandstorm at him, just to watch him flinch. He disappoints her. "To what end, you fool? Do you expect them to give you up?"

The mob arrives, armed erratically; these are nothing like the disciplined soldiers of Troia or Fabul. They keep Rubicante between themselves and their invaders.

"They wish for me to fight you," he says. "I'd prefer we didn't come to that. Go now, and don't interfere with what I have built."

Maintaining the sandstorm is tiring. Barbariccia lets it fall, and silence presses heavily in its place. "Fine," she spits. "If you enjoy this cage, remain in it forever."

Scarmiglione stalks forward, sending a tremor through Damcyan's defenders, and stops only when he nearly touches Rubicante's skin. Barbariccia strains to hear his lowered voice: "How weak are you, to crave a master?"

Rubicante's jaw tightens. "Are you simple-minded beasts, with no thought but to run wild until you find your destruction?"

"We will be whole again." In frustration, Barbariccia blasts a tower with lightning and blackens its stones. The humans tense.

"How?" Rubicante's tone is dismissive, but if he truly did not care, he would not ask.

She drifts in to whisper, teeth scraping his ear: "Alone, we cannot shatter the crystals that confine us. But if all four of us were to bring all our power to bear against one..."

"If one of us were whole," Scarmiglione adds into the other ear, "we would all soon be whole. Nothing could withstand us."

Rubicante's brow furrows, but he is otherwise still until Barbariccia's breath on his neck makes him shiver. His collar is dull and gray under her shadow and her storm, and her hands ache to shred it.

"You're both mad," he says, but he makes no move to push them away.

She scrapes a claw along his collar until the first tingle of agony runs down her finger. Of course it would be like the crystals. The pain thickens her throat as she whispers, "Who binds you?"

His body jerks backward as if there are hooks in his joints.

"Walk freely, does he?" Scarmiglione mutters, cracking the stones beneath Rubicante. A fireball forming in the latter's stiff palms dissipates as he loses his balance.

"Hold him." Barbariccia rises, twisting her hair around her to block the humans' clumsy projectiles. "I'll find the one who binds him."

She raises the sandstorm behind her as she darts through an upper window in the central part of the castle. The exertion makes her shake, but she has probably blinded half the humans and thrown Rubicante off-balance again. Whoever binds him will find control difficult through an obscuring storm.

Inside is an empty hall. Barbariccia flits back outside and in through another window; whoever controls must have a vantage point. After a moment's reconsideration, she exits and hovers above the castle until she spots a flicker of movement in a tower window. Flames rage beneath her as she blasts toward it.

There is screaming. Good. The window will not admit her, so she lets the sandstorm collapse and puts her energy into ripping her way through the stones.

Several of the humans inside are already running for the stairs. She pulls a gale up against them and knocks them back toward her. Pain erupts in her side; those who did not try to flee are guards, and armed. She forces herself to ignore them and pounce first on what must be the royal family.

They are so small, so fragile. A swipe of her claws is enough to split each open like an old wineskin.

Screaming gives way to shouting. She can eviscerate a guard as easily as a child. The blood pouring out of her must flow from her head, because its steady loss dizzies her. If only she could suck the blood back inside her. There is so much of it, soaking the furniture and drenching the stones.

Barbariccia stops when she is surrounded by unrecognizable shreds of meat. The meat encasing her won't stop trembling. She staggers to the window to see if she has won.

The fire still rages, but now it is turned toward the castle. The humans have fallen either back or still. Barbariccia floats clumsily down like a leaf catching on spiderwebs.

The air is thick with the smell of burnt flesh. She pays it no mind until she is near enough to realize that much of the stench rises from Scarmiglione, who is motionless. Rubicante's discarded robe drapes over him.

Bits of broken collar crack under her feet as she lands. They cannot harm her now.

"I am shamed by those whom I considered allies." Rubicante's voice scarcely rises above the roar of his flames. Everything between him and the castle doors is ablaze. "Their fear made them weak."

"Shut up." Barbariccia kneels and hooks a claw into Scarmiglione's back, just deep enough to pierce the skin. Blood wells up, but sluggishly.

They can tire; they can fall. She doesn't want to find out how far.

"We must flee," says Rubicante. His voice is half-lost in his fire, strung together on thinning breaths. "They have some rudimentary skill with the crystal and are sure to turn it against you soon."

She could fly father if she left them both behind, but what would be the point? She wraps her arms around Scarmiglione's torso and tries to ignore the fluids seeping up through the cloth. "Hold on to me."

When she feels the heat of Rubicante's skin on her back, she coils her hair and blasts into the sky.

They are heavy. She is heavy. Gravity swallows. The tip of her cyclone drags through the sand.

Barbariccia draws in as much air as she can and screams it back out. As Rubicante clutches tighter in alarm, she dives upward until the world recedes into sand and sea and brown-and-white crags. She tips toward the mountains before letting herself fall.

Together, they are too heavy to glide like leaves; they drop slowly, but still drop. Snow-capped peaks rise toward them. Her hair loses its tension and flies wild around her.

The winds cushion but do not break her fall. Her body judders as she hits the snow with Scarmiglione beneath her, and she is scarcely aware enough to wonder if he has been damaged further. The hot weight of Rubicante crushes the air from her.

When he rolls off, the skin of her back tenses against the cold. She lacks the energy to shiver. Stinging chills in her extremities begin to pass into numbness. She can't remember ever before being cold. She hates that she has a memory.

Rubicante's hand burns against her arm. "We must find shelter. I won't survive long in this."

They can tire and fall and stop surviving. Scarmiglione's body is as cold and stiff as the stone.

"Can't," Barbariccia tries to say, but her lips scarcely move and her breath isn't strong enough to bear her voice.

A sigh warms her shoulder. "Don't fall," he says, wrapping a white hand around either of the curved horns on Scarmiglione's back. Blearily, she watches him drag their weight through the melting snow, scraping the rock beneath. No fresh snow falls, but the wind stirs up flakes; they sizzle against him as he shivers uncontrollably, as if his entire body is a single spasming muscle.

Her vision flickers. Her heart beats too slowly to keep track of time. Perhaps they stopped moving long before she became aware that the jostling and scraping had ended.

Rock is above and below and before her, and the cold is at her back. A glowing redness resolves into a molten patch of rock that Rubicante has curled up inside, and the heat of which coaxes a sting back into her flesh. Shivers radiate out from her torso. There is a low buzzing in her ears.

They hold each other's gaze in silence. The winds howl at the entrance to their shelter, reaching just far enough inside to tug at her limp hair. The cloth between her body and Scarmiglione's is damp and sticky; without it, she would not know by touch whether she lay on him or the stone. If he breathes, he does so imperceptibly.

Barbariccia draws her cold-clumsied fingers through his hair, which is wet where the snow has melted. She doesn't know how to keep things alive.

So she stares hard at Rubicante and says, "What do we do?"

"I don't know. Perhaps he would heal if we placed him in fertile ground."

Her instinct is to seek refuge above. She might have aimed elsewhere when she fell, but having a memory does not compel her to trap herself in it. "Can you carry him down the mountain?"

"I scarcely dragged him this far. Do you have strength enough to fly?"

"I can't even move."

Rubicante draws his knees to his chest and rests his head atop them. "Then we shall wait."

 

* * *

 

Everything about the mountain is detestable except that it is too high and cold to be infested with humans. When the feeble shadow of her strength allows, Barbariccia slides to the ground, holding Scarmiglione's horns for balance, and draws her hair around her body in a cocoon. All she can do after is slump against him. Rubicante still shivers, even inside his molten pit.

There is still noise in her ears, and it does nothing to improve her mood. "I hate this," she hisses at no one in particular, though Rubicante is in her line of sight. "I hate waiting."

He shrugs at her in a gesture so human that it turns her stomach. "Falling prey to your emotions will solve nothing."

Barbariccia snarls.

At this rate, it may be days or weeks or years before she stands. Her wounds have closed, but an emptiness lingers in place of her spilled blood. Perhaps Fabul has done something with the piece of herself she left behind; perhaps she has entirely drained the reservoir of her power and must wait for rain. Perhaps she will become like Scarmiglione, still and cold and silent or thinned away to an echo in the mountains.

The buzzing slows and deepens until it becomes a whistling whisper inside her skull. Her jaw clenches against it.

"Do you hear something?" asks Rubicante.

"Do you hear something?" echoes the whisper, though not in an echo of his voice; it prickles with mockery and sounds as if it has bounced up from the pit of a deep canyon. Something about it is vaguely, maddeningly familiar.

Barbariccia's hair parts to free her arms, for all the good she would be in a fight. "Did you hear _that_?"

Her own words bounce amplified around her skull, backed by a loud hum at the upper limit of her hearing. As she tries to wince away from it, she sees Rubicante press his hands to his ears. Scarmiglione has not so much as flinched.

"You both hear," says the echo-that-is-not. "Very good."

Rubicante springs to his feet with flames gathered in his white palms. Barbariccia struggles but only slips lower to the ground, unable to support her own weight. From his angle, she can feel Scarmiglione's flesh fused seamlessly with the stone floor, as if the mountain has begun to swallow him. Her heart is a frantic hammer.

"Show yourself," Rubicante commands.

The voice's laughter ricochets painfully around her skull; her arms shake as she fumbles her hands against her ears.

"Would that I could." The voice is wry, spiteful, probably male. It soaks up emptiness like a sponge and crowds out other thoughts. "I address you now because you have finally intrigued me. How is it that you persist?"

Barbariccia's flashes through her vision as she shakes her head, but the noise will not be dislodged. She bares her teeth. "I don't care what intrigues you. What are you?"

"You should care," the voice replies. "I am all that lies between you and an ignoble end on this mountain."

She cares about "end"; she cares nothing about "ignoble." But Rubicante is bothered about both, and he puts a response together before she has sorted through her exhaustion and her dread and her contempt for a return to having no weapon but words.

"What do you ask of us?" Rubicante, absurdly, addresses the ceiling. "What do you offer?"

"Our goals align. I desire as greatly as you to see this world cleansed of humanity." The voice rises and falls as if he is weaving a spiderweb. "I too desire to see the crystals ripped from the unworthy hands of these primitive beasts."

This is a game of words, and Barbariccia does not wish to play. "I don't care what you desire. What are you? What do you know of us?"

The voice fills her head with a maddeningly languid cadence. "I watched you before you were bound. I know more of you than you know of yourselves. I know that you were never meant to exist independent of your masters. Yet here you are—weakened, fading, scarcely tethered to existence. Impossible." His words echo deep in every hollow of her body: "I can sustain you. Without me you will not last; with me you will never tire again."

Or they can tire and rest, in cycles spanning centuries if they must. Patience is less hateful than servitude. "We don't need you," Barbariccia spits before Rubicante can say anything foolish.

The voice laughs with the brightness of a blade. "Do you not realize what you have become? Do you fancy yourself the empress of the winds, the autarch of flames? What does this blighted despot expect to bow before him now?"

The words sting. She hates that words have power. Claws flexed, she growls, "I _am_ the wind."

"You fool no one, least of all yourself. You are solid flesh, and catastrophically weakened. The winds themselves scarcely recognize you."

If he were solid, she could shred him. She could tear the breath and space from him until he shriveled away. She would find the strength.

"Can you sustain him, as well?" Rubicante's tone is too soft to be challenging. The heat of his hand radiates as he brushes Scarmiglione's horn.

"He will rise under my power."

Barbariccia trusts nothing that is given, only what she takes by force, but she is cold and tired and propped against something kindred that she cannot keep alive. "And the fourth of us?"

"With me you will not tire. Free the demon of the waters with the aid of my strength, and I will sustain you all."

She doesn't trust him at all, and it will be difficult to destroy something more insubstantial even than the wind. Now is not the time to dwell on that. She is now, and she must survive.

With effort, her hand finds Rubicante's. The promise of firestorms flickers between them.

Rubicante addresses the opening of their shelter, where the wind lashes silver patterns of snow. "What do you ask of us?"

"Your services until all human life has been exterminated."

Barbariccia bristles. "We are no servants. We wear no collars."

"I said nothing of collars. I ask for vassals, not slaves."

Still she would argue, but Rubicante's warm hand tightens around hers. What else can they do? If the voice lies, then she will find a way to tear open the throat that forms it.

"Do you have a name?" asks Rubicante. He has spent far too long in the company of humans.

"Zemus." The final phoneme mingles with the hiss and howl of the wind, and the voice grows louder, deeper inside Barbariccia's ears. Its presence yawns wide inside her head until she is achingly aware that she is far too vast for her skin and far too small to be without it. Only a layer of tension separates Barbariccia and oblivion, and she is pressed tight against it. "Make space for me," Zemus says all around her, inside and out, "and I will sustain you."

What else can she do?

The great weight of her exhaustion begins to drain away; she would deflate if energy did not flow in to fill the gap. Power courses through each electric twitch of her muscles. Her hair rises around her as easily as her legs brace, gather, and push her upright. She inhales the sharp cold of the air and exhales the metallic tang of thunder.

The wind is still outside her, still frustrated when it attempts reunion, but it heeds her now without sapping her strength in return. Within the whirling warmth of her hair, she cares nothing for the cold. Her hand is suddenly too hot; she lets go of Rubicante and blows out into the night sky.

In the back of her mind, Zemus's presence presses like a pebble and vibrates at the low edge of her hearing. Barbariccia shakes her head roughly until he laughs and says, "This is how I sustain you."

For now, but not forever. She growls and spins, dragging gusts through the fallen snow. Only the winds near her understand, but she feels them now like extra limbs, like locks of her own hair. The flakes swirl in broken silver patterns like a roiling sea of stars until the rock around her is bare.

With a jolt, she flies back inside the shelter and hovers above Scarmiglione. Where his flesh fuses with the stone of the shelter, a softening rot has begun to spread. Swathes of skin slough off his bones as he pushes up to his hands and knees, groaning like a slow earthquake. His hair drains white and lank as it falls over the exposed bones of his face. When Barbariccia touches the twisted ruin of his shoulder, they both flinch.

"You promised to sustain him." Rubicante's voice is an ember one breath away from igniting.

"And so I do," Zemus replies. "I am not the one who mortally wounded him."

Gray flesh slides like mud down Scarmiglione's arms and fuses with the mountain. What remains on him is a diminished patchwork of skin and bone, sinews and tendons. His breaths are slow, labored, broken by hissing.

They cannot tire, but they can fall; this is worse than life. Unable to bear enclosure, Barbariccia shoots skyward until the mountains are a speck beneath her. Even when the air thins, she is still hyperaware of her flesh, and Zemus is still lodged inescapably beneath it. The storm she wraps around herself cannot blunt her senses.

She whirls halfway between the dead earth and the lunar void, shaking as if she still feels the cold. The thunder cannot clear her mind.

 

* * *

 

"How much do you know of Mysidia?" Rubicante asks when she returns. The rock shelter is like an oven around him now; she hovers a cooler distance back, keeping her distance from where the wreckage of Scarmiglione has shambled outside to crouch in the melting snow, in the shadow of a crag.

So they are not going to talk about it. Good. "It imprisons the last of us."

"It is a city of mages," Scarmiglione adds. Hisses and gurgles ride out on his breaths, and his voice sounds as if it is being scraped from his throat. Someday she will see to it that every human in Damcyan dies screaming.

But for now she only replies, "Then we will spill the blood of mages."

"I'm afraid it won't be so simple." Nothing with Rubicante is simple. "The Mysidian navy is the fear and envy of the world, and their dominance is such that they must be manipulating their crystal to achieve it."

"Must they," says Scarmiglione dryly.

Rubicante nods, undeterred. "The others have enjoyed only passive benefits; Fabul fears no storms when its neighbors are ravaged, Troia flourishes in what should be a wasteland, and Damcyan neither wants for fuel to burn nor suffers the cold nights of a true desert. Mysidia swallows ships whole."

Barbariccia grows bored. "I wasn't going to attack by ship."

"My point is that we will face no frightened, confused creatures with hooks and spears. They will expect us. We must expect traps."

They do not tire, but when Barbariccia draws a claw along the inside of her arm, she still bleeds. Her gaze cannot rest on Scarmiglione without making her skin itch and throb.

"Then we'll expect them," she says irritably. "Don't tell me you want to waste time making plans."

Rubicante's eyes narrow. "If we do not plan, we will waste more than time."

They watch each other without blinking. Beneath her skin she can feel Zemus pressing, silent but alert.

The tension snaps when Scarmiglione clears his throat. "What good does it do us to plan from ignorance?"

With a satisfied nod, Barbariccia extends her hair and swirls the air slowly around her kindred. Rubicante scowls but fastens himself to her back; Scarmiglione bubbles when he is drawn into the sun, so Barbariccia wraps him in a thick shield of her hair.

When he is tucked against her, the flesh on her nape gathers as if it means to leap off her bones. She grits her teeth and turns her head to minimize what she smells of him.

Then they are airborne, and she will never tire. Her companions' rigid terror scarcely registers against the ecstasy of the sky. If they did not weigh her down, she could almost feel free.

When she lands at the tip of Mysidia's bulbous peninsula, the first stars have burned through the thickening dark. Rubicante and Scarmiglione scramble away as she blasts the briny wind through her hair to rid it of the stench.

Rubicante wraps himself in a thin layer of flame. "Was all of that necessary?"

"No." The smell of the lifeless sea spoils Barbariccia's mood. She calms the air before adding, "They sleep at night. Let's attack now."

Scarmiglione death-rattles behind her. "I reject you as our strategist."

"Wisely," says Rubicante.

"And you, as well." The half-rotted heap of Scarmiglione shambles eastward, leaving soft, sinking ground in his wake. Barbariccia drifts over it and leaves Rubicante to pick his own way. "Let us see what awaits us."

The lights of human settlement glow past the crest of a hill. When Barbariccia rises above it, she sees a vast harbor sprawling inland into a town, which spreads thickly toward a castle. Mysidia is well situated to fend off attacks from the sea, and the continent to the east contains no opposing civilization. Of course, the sky is undefended.

Barbariccia has scarcely begun to ascend before Scarmiglione grabs her ankle and sends a heavy shudder through her body. "Wait. Look closer."

Her gaze flits impatiently. Here are ships stilled for the night, here streets gleaming in the moonlight, and here—here her breath catches, because just outside the castle, the silver light catches the surface of a moat and something sleek and solid breaking the surface of the water. At this distance she is unsure of visual details, but her deeper senses cannot be mistaken. Here is the fourth.

Rubicante's flames wink out in the corner of her vision. "And unguarded?" he whispers. "Surely not."

Flying low, Barbariccia approaches the castle with the others behind her. They halt at the last little bump of cover in the terrain before the ground slopes smoothly toward the moat. She still cannot see more of this piece of the water than that it is dark and sleek, and that the thin glinting curve must mark its neck.

"The ground is soft in the center of the peninsula," says Scarmiglione. "Given time, _this_ castle I can swallow whole."

"We will give you time," Rubicante replies. Barbariccia nods and flexes her claws; anything that tries to escape the sinking stones she will flay alive.

Scarmiglione's fingers digs into the soil. Before the rot has spread even as far as the moat, a bolt of lightning leaps from the castle's ramparts into the kindred creature in the moat. It twitches violently.

The earth's rot ceases as Scarmiglione seizes into a cower.

"This is a trap," Barbariccia hisses.

Rubicante's voice is sharp. "Obviously."

Lightning arcs again into the water. The creature within spasms in silence.

Under Barbariccia's skin, Zemus pulses with interest.

The next bolt is interrupted by Barbariccia's own flurry of lightning strikes against the roof of the castle. Ignoring Rubicante, she drags down the blackening clouds until all the sky is blotted out. Flagpoles rip from the stones.

Rubicante is still talking, but she doesn't have to hear him over her storm. She will not tire. She is sick of waiting. Let the humans know that there will be no escape as the earth swallows them whole.

Behind her rises a roar not of her making.

"This would be the trap," Rubicante says bitterly as she whirls. A vast wall of water falls toward them from the north, tall enough to block the sky, too heavy to be turned aside by the wind. A burst of fire flashes some of it into steam, but not nearly enough.

Barbariccia darts, but she is not faster than gravity with Rubicante clutching her heel. The water crashes down on them with the weight of a landslide, knocking out light and breath. She can't find the ground or the sky with the sea pressing in all around her and dragging her away from both.

Her chest burns from the absence of air. She needs to breathe. She will not become like Scarmiglione.

Bubbles cling to her as she reaches out to the scattered presence of air within the water. Not much, but enough; it swirls fast around her, drilling its way the surface. Up and down reassert themselves. Barbariccia kicks and claws awkwardly, still towing Rubicante's weight, until she breaks into the widening crevice of sky in the sea.

She rises in the inchoate eye of a hurricane. She will give them a storm.

"Think about what you're doing!" Rubicante shouts up at her over the wild rush of waves and wind. "For one moment, think!"

Barbariccia is nearly annoyed enough to kick him into the sea, but her eye catches the castle and harbor of Mysidia, around which the tidal waves flow harmlessly. For a moment she thinks that Scarmiglione must have been swept away, but she spies a dark speck scarcely protruding from a flooded field. As long as he is safe, the humans will not be.

Coiling her drenched hair around Rubicante, she descends and dips the tip of her funnel into the moat. When the sea begins to gather again, she flits to the other side of the castle. Crackling with lightning and groaning with thunder, she is an ideal decoy. She does not tire. Waves hurls themselves after her and recoil from the edges of Mysidia.

Flames flow from Rubicante and ignite everything that is not too wet to burn. When the water is not chasing her, it is splashing frantically over the town and harbor. The entire peninsula roils in chaos.

By the time the castle's towers pitch forward, it is too late for the humans to reverse the process. Barbariccia laughs as the earth crumbles around the foundations, and the creatures that try to flee outside provide targets for flames and lightning. The sea throws itself against the walls, but it cannot compensate for the disintegrating earth.

The center of the land caves in, and the sea swallows the castle in a shuddering gulp that ripples over the land. The void yawns westward to join the sea, leaving behind just enough land to form a mouth in profile. The sea calms. What is left of Mysidia smokes on the northern shore.

Barbariccia hovers just above the southern prong, where Scarmiglione has dug himself into the earth to ride out the rapidly receding flood waters. "I will not do this again," he rumbles, and she cannot be certain whom he addresses; his lidless eyes are fixed vacantly on the horizon. His entire body quakes. "I have lost more than Mysidia. I will not."

Rubicante slips out of Barbariccia's hair and lands where the water is only as deep as his ankles. Steam curls up along his legs. "No more than I would quench flame," he says, earning himself a quick shiver of Scarmiglione's attention.

"Pity." But Barbariccia can't keep her voice level; her mind is too heavy now to revel in Mysidia's catastrophe. Her clouds thin and disperse, letting more of the moons through to bounce their light on the water. She hates that she can smell decay on the air.

"Clumsy," Zemus whispers inside her head, "but effective nonetheless."

"Shut up," she snarls.

As Scarmiglione, coated with fetid mud, drags himself out of his hole, Zemus continues, "Cagnazzo required less persuasion than the rest of you. His keeper has drowned, and he avenges himself now upon all the human flesh that sank with the castle. Once he has accepted the futility of trying to grasp the Crystal of Water, he will rise to join you."

Scarmiglione peers into the black water at the new edge of the land. "Is he whole?"

"In body."

Then there is nothing to do but wait, and Barbariccia detests waiting. She flies in circles, drawing the wind roughly through her hair to dry it. Rubicante burns like a beacon against the fresh wound of the shore. Scarmiglione digs his hands into the earth and rolls his eyes back into his head, as if he means to means to heal the damage he caused. She doesn't see the point; he will only disappoint himself.

With a thick squelch of mud, the ground near him splits open and vomits bones. Barbariccia halts and hovers a cautious distance away as the skeleton assembles itself into the rough shape of a human, albeit one with gaps in the limbs. The thing rattles as it bows before Scarmiglione.

"Isn't that interesting," Zemus purrs.

Rubicante strides over with a handful of white fire. "Abominable. What do you mean to accomplish by violating the natural order?"

Swinging his bulk around to defend his creation, Scarmiglione hisses, "I will not take the life of the earth; do not begrudge me the dead."

A blast of lightning reduces the thing to a charred heap. Barbariccia cares nothing for order, natural or otherwise, but the sight of animated bones makes her insides twist. Masking unease with a sneer, she interrupts Scarmiglione's complaint with, "What do you need with minions? Would you play at being human?"

The argument and waiting both end when the surface of the water breaks for the dark, slick, kindred creature that hoists itself onto the shore. The flesh of Cagnazzo is less human-shaped even than Scarmiglione; he is smooth and hairless, the color of the midnight sea, and his torso is encased in a ridged shell that makes him look more turtle than man. His eyes are wild, darting, unfocused.

"You're free now," Rubicante tells him, stupidly, as if they weren't all stuffed with Zemus. Scarmiglione is so free that he lets out a laugh like a death rattle.

Cagnazzo laughs, too, or possibly just shrieks. The sounds stretches and wobbles as his body does the same, its contours flowing into something entirely human. An old woman in black robes rises from the mud and says, panting, "I tore them all to pieces. Even the ones that were already dead."

Her manic grin echoes in the curved gash that opens along her throat. With a gurgling laugh, she melts back into a turtle.

A spark of envy burns in Barbariccia; the flesh that binds him is at least flexible. When she tries to fall to pieces and scatter on the wind, she remains still and solid. "You've gone mad," she points out, as if this will make her feel better.

"Haven't you?" Cagnazzo's voice is dark and deep in this form, and hisses like breaking waves. "What I should be, I cannot touch."

"We will find a way." Barbariccia hadn't considered that a way would not simply present it, so she attempts, reluctantly, to harness the power of words: "Now that we are four again, there must be a way to combine our strength and—"

"Together," Rubicante interrupts, "we've accomplished at least as much harm as good. We have scarcely survived one another."

Part of him must still long for Damcyan and the humanity he feigned. Barbariccia bristles with contempt. "I should have left you wearing your collar like a dog." Still his temper does not ignite, which further inflames hers. "I should leave you behind now. What use are you to me?"

Zemus shushes in the back of her skull. "Have you already forgotten? You are all in my service, and my plans require your cooperation and patience."

Scarmiglione growls. "How much patience?"

"You have nothing but time, and we have much to accomplish before my pieces fall into place."

Barbariccia's frustration manifests in a bolt of lightning that scorches a patch of mud. Even before the thunder peals, Cagnazzo's head and limbs vanish inside his shell, which rocks shiver-quick back and forth. Rubicante makes disapproving noises.

When she tries to fly off, she does not. She cannot. Zemus's presence grips her spine like teeth.

"Allow me to direct you," he says dryly. "We have far to go and much to build."

 

* * *

 

For a long time, she carries. She has no choice.

First she carries her kindred westward to a great tower that shines like the beast that came from the sky. She has glimpsed it before from above, and then as now, there was no good in dwelling on it; there is no good in binding herself to the past. Instead she braces herself against heat and darkness and the loss of the sky as she is forced to follow the walls down below the surface of the earth, where the seas are fire and only Rubicante is not miserable.

The inside is miserable, as well, all cold metal and unbroken walls. There is nothing of the sky; the only light is Rubicante. At the edge of his ruddy glow, steel balls like uncanny mockeries of eyes lie in dusty piles. This place is worse than dead, and Barbariccia abhors it.

Here Rubicante and Cagnazzo remain, tasked with ridding the tower of dust and interlopers and restoring its mechanical defenses. They will probably have built a society of metal eyeballs by the time they have finished; humanity has ruined them both.

Scarmiglione she carries back into the sky and high upon the empty summit of mountain. Here at last, where the air is thin, Barbariccia begins to carry willingly, because she can no longer bear to lack even the illusion of control. Zemus remains in her, but at least not in every twitch of her muscles.

She carries stone and metal in the quantities Zemus demands. Reluctantly, ill at ease, she carries Scarmiglione to places where he can raise masses of the dead, human and beast alike. They follow relentlessly below when she flies back, over plains and through storms and along the bottom of the sea. The only sounds of their work are scraping stones and rattling bones.

They do not tire. The undead wear down to dust, but Scarmiglione is suspended in his decay like a fly in amber. Cagnazzo's fluid form flows back to the same sleek shell and smooth blue flesh. Somewhere below, Rubicante must burn steadily in the midst of rusted metal.

Barbariccia is Barbariccia is Barbariccia, and the wind abhors permanence.

"What are we building?" she asks the heaviness inside her one day, more to break the monotony than because she cares. The undead have laid a rounded fountain that covers the summit, and she is tasked now with raising them so that they can layer their stones upward.

Zemus does not answer immediately; perhaps his attention is elsewhere. "A tower," he says at last. "You should learn to like it; you'll be bound to it."

Snarling, she lets the skeletons fall and shatter. For this she loses control of her body for three days, but she is too angry to cooperate or care. It is Rubicante's fault for for craving a master, Scarmiglione's fault for having flesh too weak to heal, Cagnazzo's fault for failing to free himself. She has fought and bled and compromised and waited, and for what?

For a long time, nothing changes.


	3. Scatter

When the tower is complete, Barbariccia rises with it, within it. She is the engine, the heart throbbing behind metal ribs, and she will never tire. When something silver and strange streaks through the sky, she tries to fly beyond the point at which the tower's winds will obey her, but Zemus's control snaps her back like a noose. Zemus is a trap now, still and silent and always waiting to be sprung.

At least the interior is vast enough to let her avoid Scarmiglione. He has his corpses; she has the air to spin tight around her in spirals of hate. Together her kindred accomplished more harm than good, and she has no need of any of them.

The sky around the tower roils with perpetual storms. Far below, the world may be changing, but Barbariccia does not care.

On a day when she drifts listlessly on the electric air, Scarmiglione, wrapped in a makeshift burlap cloak, comes to the nearby balcony and watches her from the shadow of the door. Ignoring him does not banish him. No gust is strong enough to cover his stench.

"What do you want?" she asks, floating near enough to shout. Her voice scrapes and creaks; it has been a very long time since she used it.

"A favor." His voice is worse, as if his breath has forgotten which holes in his head to pass through. Or perhaps he has always sounded like this; it has been a very long time since she listened.

She perches on the edge of the balcony, digging her claws into the metal. Her hair unfurls horizontally like a banner. "Why should I grant it?"

He stares at her. If he still had eyelids, it would be easier to read his face.

She scowls. "I'm not lonely."

"Aren't you?"

A long time has passed since they lay together beneath the sky, watching the light shudder through the leaves. The memory is a warm pit yawning behind her.

When she doesn't answer, he says, "I was never meant to be like this. Here you have the sky, and I have nothing at all. I used to nurture; I used to _flourish_ —"

Barbariccia used to dance forever, without fear or form. "Stop it," she snaps, because she cannot let herself spread thinly over time. She is now, surviving. "I'll grant your damned favor if you leave me alone."

Teeth gritted, she follows him into the tower, where the air is stale and the dust of the departed lingers on the stones. Misery coats every surface. She hates every brick and every speck of mortar, every door and every stair. She suspects that she will hate even more whatever army Zemus must intend to keep in such an enormous structure.

Far below, down twisting corridors that spiral toward the tower's base, Scarmiglione leads her into a dark, damp room that smells of black soil. Drafts slip in through the windows, though he has covered them well enough to block the sun; when the door closes behind them, she senses only darkness, dirt, and the rattling hiss of his breath.

He lights torches with tremulous care. In the ruddy light (she will not fall back into pits and chains and the faces of kings), she can make out three pale buds in a patch of fertile earth.

"I want to create something alive." Scarmiglione pulls thick gloves over his hands and arms before approaching his little garden. "I've been careful."

If there is a point to this, Barbariccia can't see it. Surely this isn't some misguided effort to appease the natural order of things. "What are you growing?" she asks, curling a curious lock of hair toward the nearest bud.

"Don't," he says sharply. "They aren't ready. They wouldn't survive."

This only makes her more curious, but her hair coils itself safely behind her head. "What are they?"

"The best I can manage." Nothing remains of his lips, but the tatters of skin on his face almost suggest a smile. "They are all I have left of life and all I remember of creation."

"Minions." She snorts. "And what do you want from me?"

"A spark. A breath and a shock, to make them dream of birth."

It was probably too much to hope that the crumbling of his undead would end his desire for companionship. He is nearly as ruined as Rubicante, nearly as mad as Cagnazzo. Barbariccia gives him a long look of disdain before drawing fresh air through his curtains and swirling it slowly around the buds. Slow friction suffuses the air with a metallic tang. With a soft groan of thunder, light flickers against the tip of each bud.

Amid the ambient noise, she can hear the new hum of heartbeats.

"Thank you," says Scarmiglione. Drawing his cloak over his face, he tugs open the curtains and lets the sun spill in. It shines through the translucent buds and picks out reddish silhouettes at their centers.

Flitting out through the windows would mean passing over the buds, and Barbariccia wants nothing more to do with any of this. Her hair opens the door behind her as she replies, "Do not come to me again."

She wants none of this, none of him. For a moment she has nearly forgotten that she is too crowded inside ever to be alone, but the pressure of Zemus of is swelling now. She winces and presses a hand to the back of her throbbing head. For a blazing instant, she wants to tear apart her own flesh until there is no place left for Zemus to hide.

"Descend," he hisses inside her skull. His voice vibrates strangely, as if he is half out of breath or shouting up from a narrow pit. Or perhaps Barbariccia has forgotten what he sounds like in the years since he last spoke inside her. "I wait beneath you."

The winds scatter. Barbariccia laughs as the tower drops like a stone, eliciting a broken howl from Scarmiglione. Faster than a stone, faster than gravity—everything not attached to the floor is thrown above it. The torches sputter out. The curtains flap wildly. Whatever form of Zemus waits, she hopes to crush it.

Her spine seizes painfully as the tower lurches to a halt, but she does not regret. The buds shudder as Scarmiglione clatters against the stones.

Like a clumsy puppeteer, Zemus marches her body to the ramp at the bottom of the tower. When she crashes twice into a wall, she cannot tell whether Zemus has lost his touch for controlling her muscles or hurts her intentionally to chastise her. Scarmiglione drags himself along beside her, leaving distance enough to dodge.

For the first time in very many years, Barbariccia's feet touch grass. The air tastes thick and heavy. When Zemus unhooks from her muscles, she floats; furrowing the earth with her talons is too fraught with memories. Behind her, Scarmiglione halts at the edge of the ramp. His cloak protects him from the sun, but he cannot protect the soil from himself.

To the north is a forest, and she hears a river nearby. Everything is here but the fire.

"I knew," says a child's voice with a familiar, unchildlike intonation, "that a way would be opened for me, if only I waited. I could not have built a fitter mind."

A little boy rounds the edge of the tower. Barbariccia raises her arm to rip him apart, but a spasm rocks her entire body.

He clucks his tongue at her. "Do not pretend not to realize who I am. This vessel is the unwitting gift of one of my old foes." As he draws nearer, Barbariccia can see a sickly yellow glow seeping out through his eyes. She wonders if hers look the same when Zemus seizes complete control of her.

"I've waited long for such a mind," he adds, leaning against the tower. His motions are free of jerks and twitches. "This muddled, vulnerable blood embraces me. He might as well have been hollow, for all the resistance he offered."

Scarmiglione cocks his head and rasps, "What do you want with flesh?"

"A delicate operation is best undertaken in person. And I do miss getting my hands dirty." The body's fat little hands flex eagerly. "I have named this flesh Golbez. I expect great things from it."

Apparently Zemus is too fascinated by this body to bother any longer with Barbariccia's; she floats freely, hair coiling around her, and peers down at the flesh named Golbez. He is so small. She hasn't torn apart a smaller human since Damcyan. "Will it grow?"

"Of course." Golbez glares up at her, failing utterly to intimidate, before returning to the monologue. "Kluya has served splendidly in ignorance. Before he created this flesh for me, he carved a Devil's Road through the sea and raised the Crystal of Water that you fools sank. He gave mechanical flight to the primitive beasts of the Blue Planet. My pieces are nearly in place. The end of humanity is nigh."

Scarmiglione clears the wreckage of his throat. "How 'nigh'?"

"Silence!" Zemus's voice echoes inside Barbariccia's skull as well as out of Golbez's mouth. "You have grown insolent in my absence, but no longer." Her lips seal. The flesh named Golbez ascends the ramp on stubby legs. "Come. You will retrieve Cagnazzo; he has a new purpose for which to prepare himself."

 

* * *

 

The tower is crowded.

Golbez grows, first long and gangling, then broad and thick. His hair pales to the color of the first moon. Piece by piece, he covers himself in elaborate obsidian armor, obtained through annoyingly frequent visits to an island overrun with frogs and pigs. But Barbariccia sees little of him; Zemus keeps his flesh in the upper rooms, eating and exercising and doing whatever else keeps human bodies alive. When she circles the tower at night, his windows glow with magic.

Scarmiglione stays in the depths and, as promised, does not approach her. Sometimes she peeks in the window of his garden and watches the buds swell. By day, the sun streams through them; by night, they shimmer faintly. They are so large that Golbez as he first appeared would fit inside the most bulbous.

Cagnazzo wanders as he practices the visage and manners of Baron's king, but he wears the shapes of his fellow residents when the mood strikes him. When Barbariccia glances in a window, she learns to half-expect a twisted reflection and the echo of words she has not said. He copies laughs imperfectly; he will be, he explains to her, a humorless king.

Still he is mad, but he soothes an aching need in her flesh with a thousand shapes, male and female and complicated, all cool and wet, all kindred. He sows her storms with rain. She stays her lightning for him, that his mind will not break further.

When they come together, they visit their wrath on each other, though neither is the true target of it. Her claws slide through his flesh as easily as through water, no matter what shape he takes; he sinks the teeth of alien mouths into her stubborn solidness. Sometimes he takes her shape, and Barbariccia cuts chaotic patterns into her reflection. She draws her own blood, bleeds at her own hands, watches her own face contort with a brief, shattering freedom. When her sight and touch are at odds, she can almost forget which flesh imprisons her.

Rubicante remains underground, with his metal. He is suited to it. If Barbariccia peers through a window and imagines a place for him, she does not linger.

As she spins around the tower, faster and faster, swirling the stars above her, she does not know what she feels. She can never spin too far; Zemus is never too distracted to yank her back. She is the heart that cannot stop.

At the base of the tower, just above where the ramp extends into the open sky, the stone is smooth. Barbariccia hovers before it, hair tangling in the wet darkness of her storm. Lightning flickers in an ever-shifting web from cloud to cloud; the ground is too distant to strike.

She scrapes a claw against the smooth stone, over and over, deeper and deeper, carving the frizzle and crackle of the frustrated lightning. Over and over, deeper and deeper: so named, so tamed.

If she cannot change what sustains her, she can change what she sustains.

 

* * *

 

When Zemus at last begins to move, he moves quickly.

"Descend," he tells Barbariccia through Golbez's mouth, "to just above that waterfall. Slowly."

She complies because she cannot do otherwise. As the sky rises gradually around her tower, Cagnazzo approaches them, his edges wobbling. He borrows the naked form of Golbez, for no apparent reason but to annoy Zemus. She will miss Cagnazzo.

"I will enter the castle through the waterways," he says, in sibilant mockery of what usually comes from Golbez's mouth. "The form of a guard will see me to the royal chambers, and the king will drown in his bed. Tomorrow, I will rule Baron in his shape."

Zemus's tone is icicle-sharp. "And how will you dispose of the body?"

Cagnazzo shrugs, apparently enjoying the broad expanse of Golbez's shoulders. "Draw every drop of moisture from it and let it shrivel to dust. Bloat it beyond recognition and dump it into the water. I've options."

She wants to pull him into the air and feel his shifting flesh against her one more time; she wants to watch the look on Golbez's face when her claws and teeth sink into his image. But what is the point when Zemus would force them apart before she felt anything at all?

The tower halts with its ramp just above the surface of the lake. On three sides rise mountains; ahead, a waterfall spills over the edge. To the south is Baron, origin of the airships that fly high enough to tease her but seldom quite high enough to be a target for her storms. Someday the wind will again strike down anything unnatural that violates the sky.

"I will be observing," Zemus begins, but Cagnazzo gestures impatiently for an end. Cagnazzo's borrowed form stiffens as Zemus repeats, with emphasis, "I will be observing your progress from here. You must be in securely in place, without arousing suspicion, before you act. Wait for my orders. Should an appropriate position become available in Baron's military, I will arrive in the flesh to fill it."

Scowling, Cagnazzo shimmers back into a turtle. "As we have discussed."

"As we have discussed. Now leave this tower."

Sick of his smugness, Barbariccia interjects, "I've named this tower Zot."

If Zemus is displeased, he buries the emotion under disdain. Golbez's face seldom conveys anything that is not at least mixed with disdain. "No matter. Now go, Cagnazzo."

Cagnazzo catches her eye briefly, intensely, before slipping from the ramp into the water. The lake swallows him and ripples away his intrusion. As his shape crests the waterfall and vanishes, she tries not to wonder if she will see him again.

Zot rises, higher than airships fly. If humans have seen and wondered, their curiosity will not be satisfied.

 

* * *

 

Barbariccia watches the world below, though little is clear from her altitude. Airships fly like gnats from the gray smudge of Baron, perhaps toward Mysidia; according to Zemus, the mages never rebuilt their empire, settling instead for a peaceable, defenseless existence. She hates that she will not be the one to swoop in and reduce the last of Mysidia to a charred ruin.

Soon, Zemus is terribly pleased. He is less insufferable when he is furious.

"To Baron," he says, "but not too near; land us slowly in the field to the west. The Red Wings are ready for my direct command, and the amusing coincidence of their former commander will serve my purpose elsewhere."

"I don't care," says Barbariccia. "Do we have the crystals? Where are they?"

"Patience. The Crystal of Water awaits me now in Baron."

Even now Cagnazzo is probably trying to grasp it, holding fast until his nerves are too blasted to feel pain and his hands are slack and numb. Eventually, they will find a way to free themselves, and they will find the part of Zemus that is solid and find a way to rip it to shreds. For now she survives.

"And the next?" she asks, but Zemus hushes her. Zot drifts down below the peaks of the nearest mountains.

Golbez's black gauntlets clink as they flex eagerly. "No, land instead in the fields to the north, over the mountains. Slowly."

Annoyed, Barbariccia shifts the winds. The base of the tower scrapes against a crag, throwing him off-balance. In the future, he will likely specify "smoothly."

Where she expected a field, she finds the aftermath of a landslide. They are near enough now to hear the groan of shifting rocks over the roar of her storms. "East," Zemus commands, and Barbariccia is too preoccupied to make the shift in directions interesting. Somewhere below, Scarmiglione must be watching through a window, remembering.

"There. Do you see what shines amid the rubble?"

Barbariccia flits outside, as far as she can from Zot without rousing her leash. As the tower settles into a low hover, she follows the glint of sun on metal to a battered suit of armor at the edge of the landslide's reach. The man inside does not appear to be dead, but she could easily remedy this.

"Bring him to me," Zemus whispers inside her head. Her muscles freeze as he adds, "Alive and without further injury."

The armor clatters in her grasp. Beneath it lies soft flesh. If not for Zemus, she could draw all the air from it and leave it hard and shriveled, gray as stone. She would turn men into statues just to shatter them.

Barbariccia alights on the windowsill and sets the armor on the floor, not especially gently. "You already have one body to wear," she says. "What do you want with another?"

"I don't mean to wear this one. I have observed the turmoil of his mind and found it vulnerable." The black metal over Golbez's hand cups the back of the stranger's helmet. "And he is well positioned. Through him, I will strike at the heart of Kluya's legacy."

She scoffs. "Why do you care how these creatures connect to each other?"

"Silence!" His voice blasts from Golbez's mouth and inside her head, vibrating down her frozen bones. "You will take me now to Baron. Slowly. Smoothly."

Zot rises, and Zemus leaves for its higher chambers with the stranger rattling in his arms. Barbariccia steers the tower in long, lazy spirals, as if she is stirring honey. She is sick of "slowly." She will make Zemus sick of "slowly."

She suffers again when he returns and is not yet above Baron, but she doesn't regret.

"Our guest is resting in my quarters," he says when the ramp at last touches the earth. "You are not to harm him. He will be useful."

Barbariccia doubts this. As soon as Golbez has touched the ground, she blasts her tower into the sky, faster than gravity, piercing layers of clouds until the air is cold and thin.

Outside, she drifts through thin white wisps studded with flecks of ice. She has no desire now for windows.

 

* * *

 

The world rolls by, far below. Barbariccia parts the clouds to watch it, then whirls them back impatiently into a storm when she tires of watching. She is sick of waiting. She is sick of everything.

As she spirals her way up the outside of the tower, hair trailing behind her, she spies movement.

The blue armor, less dented now, is leaping its way to the top. Window to window, ledge to ledge—each leap is precise and powerful, without hesitation. Whatever animates the armor has no fear of the long fall to the ground.

As the man arcs smoothly to the next ledge, Barbariccia interrupts him with a gust. He twists sharply and manages to land on a lower protrusion, where he crouches for balance. Now he hesitates.

His head snaps to face her as she flits nearer. His eyes do not glow in the shadow of his helmet; she wonders if Zemus is a constant pressure in the back of his head, or if trapping a human in a flying tower is control enough.

Absurdly, he brandishes a spear. Barbariccia stirs a cyclone at his feet and watches with interest as he jumps clear of it to a higher ledge. Another leap, and he will reach a window and the promise of firmer ground; that wouldn't be any fun at all. Clouds gather to obscure the landing space.

She waits, teeth bared and gleaming, for his next move, but he remains warily still. At last he asks, in a low growl of a voice, "What are you?"

 _The wind,_ dances on her tongue, but she has a tongue on which words can dance. Tasting bitterness, she replies, "The Empress of the Winds."

He nods and, annoyingly, appears to relax. "Lord Golbez told me of you."

A blast of wind makes him teeter, though he keeps his balance. Barbariccia curls her lip at him. "What are you?"

Discomfort flickers over what is visible of his face. "Kain Highwind."

"I did not ask for your name."

His head shakes almost imperceptibly. "I was the commander of Baron's Dragoons. Now I am... uncertain."

This conversation bores her. She sweeps a powerful updraft against him, knocking him from his perch. Intriguingly, he does not fall; he rides the wind like a shining bird, just long enough to kick off the wall of the tower and land on a higher ledge. His next jump takes him to the flat expanse of the roof.

Barbariccia hovers over him, resting her arms on her hair. The ends rustle in eddies against her feet.

Kain's hands still grip his spear, but with no promise of violence. "What do you want?"

She aches to tear him apart, but Zemus might destroy her in turn, and she can't decide which is more abhorrent: existing as she is, or not existing at all. So she spins a cyclone around him, to watch him leap clear of the top. The tower begins to descend at her command; still he lands in a delicate clatter of metal. As long as he remains uninjured, he is hers to toy with.

A fresh gust drags him toward the edge of the roof, but he soars above it and flips back to solid footing. "What do you want?" he asks again, with a sharper edge.

To shatter—flesh and crystals and earth and sky and every human bone. Barbariccia must not let herself become lost in desire. She is now, and now there is nothing to shatter at all. What can she do but laugh?

The air electrifies as the tower sinks into thunderheads. Lightning threads from cloud to cloud in a dazzling ring.

"Dance," she says, and draws down a storm.

He moves like a creature of the air, as if he is not bound in flesh and metal. Barbariccia abandons caution and revels in chaos, savoring each moment when he comes within a breath of falling. She will never tire. Thunder rolls like a throbbing heart.

The dance ends abruptly when Zemus clamps down on her limbs. As the storm disperses, the whir of blades and heavy clunking of an engine draw near. Panting, Kain kneels at the edge of the roof.

Zemus has brought his flesh back, and with it an airship. A vile thing, and worse up close—Barbariccia smells oil and grits her teeth against the mechanical din. There is no grace to seeing such an impossible thing in flight. It does not ride the wind, but forces a clumsy path; the closest an airship will ever come to dance is cracking apart and raining down in windswept pieces.

The airship aligns its deck with the roof and extends a ramp, over which passes Golbez. His armored hand rests on Kain's shoulder as he says, in a voice that burrows through the noise into the back of Barbariccia's skull, "Every airship on this planet is under my command. There is no reason to cloak this tower in storms."

Barbariccia's lips are frozen together, so she expresses disagreement with a glare.

His attention shifts to Kain, who still kneels, whose skin must shine with sweat. "Come. If you are recovered, I will make use of you."

When her muscles finally loosen, she peers over the edge of the roof at the diminishing red dot of the airship. She is not lonely, but the roof no longer appeals to her.

Scarmiglione's buds are wider now than the door to their room. For a long time Barbariccia hovers outside the window, trying to feel only relieved that he is not near his sun-drenched garden.

 

* * *

 

Her weeks-long storm disperses against her will, exposing the roof to the silver light of the stars and the round moons. Pressure and noise thrum in her head. The airship has returned.

Zemus has brought more flesh: a woman struggles and shouts as Kain forces her into the tower. But something far more interesting pulses nearby, and Barbariccia trembles as the cloaked crew carries the shining essences of kindred and self from the airship.

Green shines brighter than stars and moons and the memory of the sun. Barbariccia swats away its bearers with her claws until they are out of sight, touch, and mind. All the world is the cold light that makes her lose all sense of size; she is a speck before it, yet infinitely larger than her skin. Everything she should be whirls inside it. Keening, she scrapes her claws against its planes until her fingers burn too fiercely to move.

"Savage." Golbez's sneer twists his voice.

Barbariccia staggers back against her will. The prison of the wind vanishes into Zot, along with water and fire. All that is missing is earth.

"The Crystal of Earth presents certain complications." There is less of a hiss in his voice, less of Zemus. "The resources of Baron will be of little use in retrieving it."

"Where is Cagnazzo?" she asks sharply.

"Maintaining power in Baron. The kingdom is not yet useless to us."

In the dark, Zemus glows only dimly through the eyes of Golbez. They are almost his own, but twisted; she imagines glass corkscrews tunneling into his brain. Perhaps he no longer requires so much of Zemus's attention.

Barbariccia shows him her teeth. "There is too much humanity in this tower. Wear your Golbez to bother Rubicante."

Golbez makes a fist of his gauntlet; her throat squeezes shut. As she claws at her neck, he intones, " _Lord_ Golbez. You will learn to show respect."

She stumbles, gasping, as air and blood flow again.

"I will occupy where I please. For now—" his eyes dim further, until for a moment he is only flesh, his brow creased in thought— "Rubicante has nearly prepared the Tower of Babil to my specifications. For now, patience."

For now, Zemus is spread thin. Barbariccia turns her back on Golbez and dives over the tower's edge to spin around its base. Her clouds gather again, alive with lightning. Let him worry about damage to the airship.

 

* * *

 

The upper floors of Zot reek of humanity. The roof is worse; here the airship remains, and Kain does not present himself as a plaything. Lower, the half-intelligent creatures that disembarked from the airship roam aimlessly, inhuman but still unwelcome. When she peers though the windows of the highest room, she sees the woman bound and Kain looming beside her. They speak, sometimes, at cross purposes. Occasionally Barbariccia catches his gaze and holds it until he shivers.

When she peeks in and finds him absent and the woman asleep, she drifts inside on a cold breeze. Tendrils of wind tug at the woman's hair and startle her awake.

The woman focuses sharply on Barbariccia before her gaze darts to either side. She sets her chin and says nothing. Above her hangs a sharp, heavy blade, and her chains are too tight to let her wriggle out of its path. A quick jostle of the mechanism, and she would be split in half, free and ruined.

Barbariccia would be split in half in return. She hates that she fears this. Hovering low, legs tucked up to put her nearly level with the woman's face, she drifts close. "What would you do," she asks, hooking a claw into the chains that hold the woman's arms overhead, "if you were no longer bound?"

This has caught the woman off-guard. She chews her lip for a moment before replying, voice low and and half-hopeful, "I would do everything in my power to free Kain from the darkness that entrances him. Together we would take the airship and fly to Cecil's aid."

There must be nothing of Zemus in her at all, if she thinks this possible. Barbariccia's lips part in a sneer as she leans in to whisper, "I would tear you all apart."

The woman's body stiffens. "What do you want?"

Wind flutters through her garments. The air stinks of flesh and fear. "I told you," Barbariccia says. Her claw slips from the chain and leaves a thin red slit down the woman's arm.

Warning pressure stirs behind her brain. Her claws skip lower and rend fabric, instead.

Instead of crying for help, the woman breathes deeply, evenly. Her voice is almost calm when she says, "What binds you? If you release me—"

Barbariccia digs her sharp teeth into the woman's lip, just deep enough to bring blood welling up into her mouth. Underneath these creatures are wet jumbles of organs, scarcely held together by their fragile frames. Underneath Barbariccia is no different, no less wet and fragile. She hates that she cannot draw blood without being reminded of her own.

The woman trembles but does not flinch away. Her body is like a reed, bending to avoid breaking.

When the pressure in Barbariccia builds nearly to the point of paralysis, she lets go and bares her bloody teeth. The taste on her tongue is metallic, darker and sweeter than lightning. "You would do nothing. When I am free, the winds will rip you to shreds. You will not leave this tower alive."

Blood dribbles down the woman's chin onto her clothing. Her voice and gaze are steady. "I won't give up hope."

"It won't do you any good." A parting slash leaves tattered fabric and shallow scratches over the woman's midsection. Let her try to live in some shining fantasy of the future; let the itch of drying blood bring her back to now. Let her try and fail to escape her solidness.

 

* * *

 

Kain finds her later, ascending in tight spirals through the hollow places of the tower. He leaps easily above her first gust and lands, body tensed, on a higher balcony. "Leave Rosa alone."

"I do as I please." Barbariccia waits until he is airborne again to ambush him with an updraft. He falters but does not fall, and glides down to a narrow walkway. Stale air stirring eagerly around her, she descends.

He glares up at her. "You're Lord Golbez's beast, and do as he wills."

Snarling, she swipes at him with the force of a hurricane, and this he cannot dodge; his armor clatters against the wall. In one swoop she is above him, hair splayed like a nimbus. Let there be nothing in his vision but her. She wants to fill his eyes, his mind, his soft wet places with her claws. She aches to find out what she would do to him if Zemus did not throb inside her.

Breathing hard, she growls, "You have no idea what I am."

Cold ripples the flesh of her midsection as Kain's spear presses against it. He too is short of breath. "I don't care. Stay away from Rosa. I will not warn you again."

A twitch, and the strange things inside her flesh would come spilling out; a twitch, and he would suffocate and shrivel. Zemus would probably stop them first or kill them after, but this knowledge does not slow her blood.

This is forever, tense and quivering like the surface of a raindrop. Barbariccia hisses with a muddle of disappointment and relief when Zemus jerks her backward and leaves her suspended past the edge of the walkway. Kain's eyes linger on her for only a moment before he leaps up and away, one ledge at a time, to the top of the tower.

She pitches forward out of her paralysis and lets herself sink to the bottom of the shaft. No matter how slowly she drifts, she cannot soothe herself. Her blood whirls like a cyclone inside her ears.

How long has it been since she last sighed through these halls? Her drifting carries her to the door to Scarmiglione's garden, which she knows by the mingled smells of fertile soil and faint decay seeping out into the hall. Even before she blows in the door, she knows from the staleness of his stench that she will not find him inside.

The buds still grow, and must be on the verge of blooming; already the puckered tips are loosening. Scarmiglione is nowhere to be found. Why would she hope to find him?

Barbariccia roars out the windows and up to the roof to give her frustration life in lightning. Each strike scorches the stone without design or pattern. Let it strike the same place twice, thrice, more times than she cares to count; let there be no illusion of security. If the airship were here, she would shatter it without regard for consequences.

Her storm rages, and Zemus must be too busy elsewhere to care.

When the airship does return, a red dot raising above the fat white clouds, it docks at the ramp at the base of the tower. Annoyed, Barbariccia descends. If Zemus is distracted, she will take advantage. Someday he will be too distracted to keep her claws out of Golbez's throat.

The propellers slow and still. The clamor of the engines fades beneath the howl of the wind. When Barbariccia begins to whirl her hair around herself, the reek of mortality wafts up to her.

Hunched beneath his cloak, Scarmiglione drags himself across the ramp. Barbariccia alights in front of him and digs her talons into the stone as she asks, "Where are you going?"

His face, as always, is unreadable. "Lord Zemus sends me to slay a human that bothers him."

"Don't call him that. We bow to no one, least of all—" Her tongue snaps to the roof of her mouth and sticks there. Insults tangle on her lips.

Scarmiglione exhales a rattling breath. "We bow. What is the good of pretending otherwise?"

Glowering, she spits until her mouth is clear. "If _he_ meant to slay, he would slay himself. What else is the point of the flesh he wears?"

"Yet he sends me. Do you envy me my assignment?"

Part of her would call any creature "lord" for the hollow satisfaction of ripping humanity apart, but most of her is too unfixed now in time, too aware of the past in her wake and the future clawing its way over her horizon. "He means to see you destroyed, now that he has no further use for you."

He shrugs like a slow landslide. "I am already dead, Barbariccia. What more can be done to me?"

Part of her, a much larger part, wants to scream until the tower crumbles to dust. "You _fool_. You great ruined idiot. Finish dying; I won't mourn you."

For a moment he gazes inscrutably at her, then shambles around her toward the airship. As he passes, he says, "Care for my children if they bloom without me."

"I do not care for children."

When the engines of the airship growl again, she does not turn. When the propellers chop her winds, she does not turn. Only when the sound moves away does she find herself chasing after it, until she reaches the edge of her leash and snaps back.

By the time she finishes with it, the roof is a charred wasteland.

 

* * *

 

She is drifting aimlessly, tucked up in her own hair, when her body jolts and spasms in agony. Her nerves scream as if a chunk has been bitten from her heart. When the pain passes into electric aftershocks, she can feel a hollow place inside her, a cold altar carved out for the dead.

She knows. The earth below cries out. She knows, but still she spins in through a window of the upper chambers to ask.

Golbez is here, eyes flickering a brighter gold when they focus on her. The woman—Rosa—is still bound, still tattered from Barbariccia's previous visit. Kain tenses beside her.

"Where is he?" Her voice comes out in thin pieces. It still hurts to breathe.

Zemus's voice echoes in her head as Golbez's mouth moves: "Scarmiglione has fallen."

"I know that!" Gusts blast through her hair and rattle the blade above the Rosa. Kain blurs into a solicitous panic. "Where _is_ he?"

"He isn't. He is not merely undead, but dead. A ghost damned to wander, forever out of reach." Golbez's eyes shine like infected stars. "Did you think yourselves immortal?"

Storm clouds gather fast and thick like iron shavings to a magnet, forming a shield against the sunlight. The tower freefalls until Zemus seizes her to stop it. Somewhere in the dark, something howls.

"Outside with you," says Zemus, "or I will bind your will indefinitely. You're even more irrational than usual."

Lightning arcing from cloud to cloud illuminates the room in flashes. Barbariccia bares her teeth to catch an instant of light. "You swore to sustain us."

"I did not swear to sustain your flesh, and I will not sustain flesh that fails to keep itself in one piece."

When she tries to speak again, her jaw clenches shut.

"Let us hope," he adds, "that Cagnazzo fares better."

Her storm sucks all light and life from the sky. She whirls inside it, unable to remember leaving the tower. Her howl joins imperfectly with the howl of the wind, longing for an impossible reunion. If she could, she would tear Zot to pieces. So named, so tamed, so hers to nurture or destroy. What is the point of names without power?

Barbariccia never tires. The storm can rage forever, until Zemus forces her to stop. She never tires, but weariness is a dark sea inside her skull.

This is the base of the tower, where the air is heaviest. There is nothing here for her. Still she sinks through a window, if only to defy Zemus's command to stay outside. She cannot pretend that she rides the vagaries of the wind, that she does not know exactly where she will end.

The door shatters under her claws. Her breaths mingle the scent of soil with that of the lightning. Decay lingers so faintly that she cannot trace it to smell or memory.

With a twist of her hand, she strikes the dead torches with lightning and lights the room in red. Let it burn behind her. She should not be the only one charred and hollow inside.

The enormous flowers are at last beginning to bloom. Peeling back the petals of the largest, she finds a round, almost-human figure sleeping inside, its skin strange and shiny like an insect's husk. Inside the next is an elongated figure curled up knees-to-mouth, and the smallest houses what looks like a child. All are female-shaped; all crackle like mages.

If Scarmiglione were still alive, Barbariccia would mock his need for minions. This is more pathetic even than his animated corpses; this is a desperate attempt to regain the flesh he was first bound in. This is compromise, despair, an admission of loneliness. Barbariccia hates it.

But if she walks away, Zemus will claim these creatures for himself, and her spite will not tolerate this.

She swirls the hot air around the buds, coaxing them open. As the petals fall, the creatures inside stir, uncurl, flick open iridescent compound eyes. They sit up and regard her curiously, heads tilted in unison, dark hair spilling like spidersilk over their shoulders. They do not know yet to fear the fire.

"Your father is dead," Barbariccia tells them. If she speaks contemptuously enough, no other emotions can sneak into her tone. "You're mine now."

 

* * *

 

Barbariccia does not care for children.

They follow her like foals, like ducklings, like wide-eyed shadows. Flying the length of the tower allows her to be alone, but only until they bumble their way to her through the maze of stairs and corridors. Magic comes to them more readily than motor skills; when they stumble, they leave slicks of ice and glowing barriers on the floor. She knows their approach by the jangle of their spilt spells.

"Magus Sisters," she calls them, because they are not truly hers until she names them, and she does not wish to call them individually. They move like three pieces of one being. Even their magic ebbs and flows between them, one spell in three mouths.

When she spends an entire day without catching sight of them, she wonders idly if they have died. She doesn't know how she will feel if she never sees them again. Fury and frustration have filled her to bursting, and she finds no release in her storms; she has no room left to feel anything else.

But the next day they wave to her from the cratered ruin of the roof, unaware that they should fear the lightning, and she hovers over them for lack of anything better to do. Closer, she can see that they have made themselves impractical clothing out of mismatched bits of fabric. The round one grins and says, "We found names."

The elongated one nods eagerly. "I'm Sandy!"

"Cindy," says the round one with a dainty curtsy.

The little one bounces, making her ridiculous hat wobble. "Mindy!"

Everything in this tower thinks it's human. Barbariccia whips them sharply with her hair, just to hear them shriek, and growls, "You have no names but what I give you."

They bend and scrape and cower, but she hears them later sharing their chosen names in whispers. What does it matter? Let them imagine they have any control at all over what becomes of them.

Her claws scratch "ZOT" above every door, and still the tower floats.

 

* * *

 

Another jolt, another spasm, another white-hot pain cauterizing a new hole in her chest: Cagnazzo ends while she is stalking Kain through the windows. Barbariccia digs her claws into the curved stone and pants, waiting for it to pass.

It will never pass. They will never be restored, never free. How can she exist in the moment when the future hangs always over her like a blade?

Her claws scrape down the stone and come to rest, shaking, over her abdomen. Perhaps she could tear herself apart before Zemus intervenes. Let all the flesh and stone come crashing down. Oblivion all at once cannot be worse than oblivion in a thousand pieces.

She can't stop shaking. Hope and fear are the oceans rising above her head, and she does not know which one drowns her. The wind never hoped nor feared, nor felt anything at all.

Enough light muddles through the clouds to pick out the blue of Kain's helmet. He stands just inside the window, straight and wary, but too close to be anything but curious. He is not far from the chamber where Rosa is chained; even his dull human ears would hear her if she screamed.

Barbariccia catches his gaze and holds it like a tree in a tornado, wondering if he ever ventured low enough in the tower to cross the path of Scarmiglione, if he encountered Cagnazzo, if Golbez took him to Rubicante. Have they all touched him without leaving a single mark?

Her hand rests butterfly-light on his breastplate, and he does not pull away. Her hair drifts like a long sigh. The thunder quiets to groans.

His lips part as if he means to speak, but the breath he draws jumps into a gasp as she snaps her hair into a tight cyclone around them. The stones of the windowsill crack and scatter beneath her. Darting forward into the tower pitches his body against hers.

All his world is her, golden and sharp.

"Release me." His voice is dark and deep enough to hide any spark of panic. When he tries to push away, her hair grinds down the decorative spines of his armor. He winces against her.

"Where will you go now?" she whispers eagerly.

His boots strike her knees, and in a violent rush he leaps upward through the eye of her storm. Barbariccia bats at him with conflicting winds, just to watch him dance in the air. For a moment, he might even believe that he can escape when he wishes.

A tease, a feint, and he leaps smoothly toward a parallel walkway. At the height of his arc, she catches his leg with the tail of her cyclone and slams him down before her. For a moment he is stunned. All she needs is a moment to uncoil her hair and pin him.

He must know that he is small enough to crush, that his armor cannot withstand her, that she can bind his limbs with a flick of her hair. "Do you think you can control what becomes of you?" she says, and laughs at his struggles. "Creature of the air, you are mine to claim."

His eyes narrow. "Enough. Release me."

"I find no release. Why should you?" Talking has begun to bore her. Angling her chin around the tip of his helmet, she bites his lip and tastes his dark-sweet-electric blood. Every ineffectual twitch of his body feeds the frenzy building inside her. The metal encasing his hips splits open under her claws; the cloth below shreds more easily than skin. Her impatience leaves shallow scratches on the flesh she exposes.

Alarm tightens his voice: "I don't want—"

She rips the air from his throat. "I don't care."

When she straddles him, a paralyzing force seizes the base of her skull. Her muscles fall slack in the instant before Golbez's armored hand grabs her shoulder and throws her backward on the floor.

"You have your own toys," Zemus says dryly. "Don't break mine."

He leaves with Kain silently in tow, and the paralysis passes. Barbariccia rises, shaking with fury and frustration and feelings that she does not care to explore, and goes to vent them all on her unwanted minions.

Their flesh does not satisfy her. Nothing can satisfy her. She could rip every living thing on the planet to pieces and still howl her misery to the stars. Nothing will ever again be as it was. The past and the future are impossible gravities keeping her suspended between them, pulling her apart far past the point she should have snapped.

The Magus Sisters shriek when she throws them, naked, from the roof of the tower. The wind does not catch them until they have fallen past the base. Within an instant they begin cooing with wonder, as if they could not easily fall again. Stupid, fearless, enviable things—they have not learned to dread. They have no notion of loss.

Barbariccia whirls them in erratic cyclones, despising them.

She could strip away the thin membranes holding them together, let them tumble in red and white pieces to the dead earth. She could suck the breath and space from them, then shatter their brittle remains against the tower. She could set them back on the roof and sigh softly through their hair.

She can do with them as she pleases. This is the closest she can come to what she should be, and even this is not enough; she is not truly free to destroy them when she has nothing to take their place.

Somewhere beneath the sky and sea and soil, Rubicante too is half-dead. She can't stop herself from wondering which will feel the other's loss. They are spiraling down together into oblivion, and she can see no way out.

 

* * *

 

When Zemus summons her to the roof, Barbariccia is too weary to search for loopholes in his command to disperse her storm. She hovers listlessly above him, ignoring Golbez's gestures of disapproval at the damage she has done. The airship is back. She does not remember when it left.

"The Crystal of Earth comes to us," he says. "You should be pleased by our progress." Golbez's eyes are all Zemus today, shining like suns through a polluted fog. If she peeled him down to quick and core, he might turn out to be only a shell for that ruinous light, his soft and wet places shriveled away.

When she says nothing, he continues, "Were you aware that the crystals cast shadows during the trauma of their creation? I expect not; you've never been especially aware. Regardless, already Rubicante has captured two, and I will see to the retrieval of the rest personally once the earth is in my hands."

How can Barbariccia ever be whole when she doesn't even know how many pieces imprison her? Her rage simmers but cannot find the energy to well up inside her. "What do you want?"

"Those creatures Scarmiglione created—"

"Magus Sisters," she interjects, and loses her breath for it.

"Whatever they are, set them to guard my chambers. I do not doubt that Cecil can best the monsters in this tower—"

"Zot." This time the reprimand hits her spine like a dagger.

Golbez stares at her for a moment in silence, daring her to interrupt again. "Let us see whether your minions have any worth. Killing Cecil with these hands would not be disagreeable, but I'd just as soon take the crystal from his corpse."

She doesn't care what Cecil is, or what Cecil is to him. With a gesture that is half-shrug, half-nod, she dives into the tower.

It never takes long to find them. The bend toward her like flowers seeking the sun. As they emerge from the shadows, humming with magic, she catches herself looking for Scarmiglione in the lines of their faces.

"Guard _Lord_ —" if she must say, she will spit it— "Golbez's chambers. Humans will come. Kill them."

The little one bobs eagerly. "We'll use our Delta Attack! Pow!"

Barbariccia imagines what they will look like dead: limbs curled in like spiders', eyes dark and flat, bodies desiccated as their magic drains out with their ichor. They are not kindred; they will not take a piece of her with them. "Try not to die," she adds, dully.

The round one salutes. "Yes, Mistress Barbariccia!"

"We'll do our best!" the tall one adds.

They scamper away like one animal with six legs. Barbariccia decides that she will not miss them when they die, because she is already worn too thin.

She peers through a window at Rosa, who has not yet been cut in half, and Kain, who clutches his spear and glares with cold rage. Barbariccia catches Rosa's gaze, instead, and draws her lips back slowly from her teeth. They will not be prisoners here forever. Even the widest spiral narrows, and she will pull everything with her as she dances down into the dark.

 

* * *

 

The wind had no notion of time. Barbariccia feels it like a drumbeat in her chest, faster and faster and faster. The essence of the earth shines at the base of the tower and will rise quickly. The earth is already dead.

Changes builds like an electric charge in a cloud. Good. She is more than sick of stagnation.

When Zemus pulls her to the highest chamber, where Kain still stands warily at Rosa's side, she crackles giddily. "Your servants have failed," he says, and she cannot stop laughing. Golbez's fingers snap to choke her, and still she cannot stop.

The words from Golbez's mouth echo inside her head: "At present, I have no more faith in your abilities than in those of your dead minions. Remain here; keep my tower aloft. I will take care of the matter myself." He tosses his cloak back over his shoulder. "Come, Kain."

Resistance weighs down Kain's legs as if he is walking against a gale, but follow he does. As he passes Barbariccia, he all but snarls, "Leave her alone." She shows him her teeth.

When the door closes behind him, she drifts over to Rosa, whose body tenses like a bowstring. The blade above her trembles when Barbariccia stirs the air around it.

"Were you bait for the Crystal of Earth?" Barbariccia cups Rosa's chin in her claws, drawing pinpricks of blood. "Kain has not realized, but perhaps you have. What is the use of you now that the crystal has arrived?"

Rosa's gaze is defiant, though she says nothing. Her jaw cannot move without cutting ribbons from her flesh.

"Your captor leaves you with me because you have no further purpose. Have you realized that, as well?" Barbariccia sinks her claws deeper for a moment before she lets go and moves in closer, reaching her hand up to the rope that holds the blade. Rosa's blood trickles onto her arm.

"Cecil is coming for me," Rosa says, voice nearly steady. "He'll be here soon. I have faith in him."

In answer, Barbariccia caresses the rope with a single claw, using just enough pressure to fray it. A straining fiber splits. Change comes; let it begin slowly and accelerate.

"Let's both be free," she says into Rosa's ear. "Let's both dread."

Rosa's breaths quicken. "I've done nothing to you. Please—"

Her voice catches on a gasp as Barbariccia's claw traces a thin red line down her side from underarm to hip, parting fabric as easily as water. "Let's both," Barbariccia whispers, "be in pieces."

Another fiber snaps. Closing her eyes, Rosa calls Cecil's name like a prayer.

"He's dead." Barbariccia floats backward and fights the laughter wobbling her lips. "Everything in this tower is dead."

She soars out the window to the roof and tears the sky apart. Wind everywhere, in everything, and she can scarcely breathe for laughing. There is no rain for her tempest, no dust for her sirocco. Lightning peppers the roof but finds nothing to burn.

All the clouds disperse as she comes crashing down in a moment of paralysis.

Golbez stands over her with his head cocked, as if he has no idea what she is. No light pours from his eyes; they only catch what light can reach through his mask, and bounce it back a pale violet. The four crystals bounce past him on the backs of beasts, which his gaze follows, baffled, to the airship.

When Barbariccia tries to rise, Zemus does not cast her down. Grinning, she flies claws-first at Golbez's face.

Her muscles seize in the instant before she strikes, but only for an instant. She collects herself before she hits the roof. Golbez's eyes flicker like sluggish fireflies.

"Kill them," he says, but the sound is all in her head; Golbez is silent beneath his mask.

She sneers. "Because you were too weak to do so yourself?"

Zemus's voice fades in and out: "...brought a wizard... somehow... Meteor... destroyed him..."

The light empties from Golbez's eyes. Barbariccia surges forward and sets her hands on either side of his helmet, basking in the bemused fear on what she can see of his face. How easily she could crush his head—but Zemus still seems to have control enough for emergencies.

"How easily this flesh has shaken you off." She smiles, eyelids low and teeth bared, and hooks her claws into the angles of his helmet. "Dread the day that I cast you out and sever every string in your puppet."

Golbez's eyes blaze yellow, and he shakes her off with a hiss to hurry on to his airship. Barbariccia rises into the air, laughing, hair spiraling around her.

Every bolt that she aims at the airship darts aside, and the pressure of Zemus builds faster and faster in her head. But Zemus is fallible. If he fears a spell named Meteor, she will learn to wield it with her own hands against the weight in her own skull. Half-dead and reckless, she will see him spiral down with her.

For now, she kills.

The highest window of Zot opens above the room where Rosa should be dead, but isn't; the blade sticks bloodlessly in the floor, and all of Rosa, both halves together, is in the arms of the man who must be Cecil. Two more humans stand near him, and Kain, as well.

Her creature of the air has the fickle loyalty of a breeze. Does Zemus know how easily his plaything betrays him? Perhaps Barbariccia will keep him after the others are torn to shreds, to enjoy until she tires of him. Her command is to kill, with no prohibition against "eventually."

She descends in a cyclone, laughter echoing from the walls. She hurls words like spears, to see how much Rosa and Kain will tremble at her voice: "It seems I underestimated you. I’d not have thought you strong enough to wound Lord Golbez."

Rosa clutches Cecil tighter. Kain shouts something to his new comrades that Barbariccia does not care to hear, so she raises a flurry of gusts. He leaps between them, gliding on updrafts, until he perches on a jutting stone at the top of the window.

She hovers nearer, just out of range out of his spear, and hisses, "So you’ve betrayed us. And with all that _strength_ , too—such a waste!" She flexes her claws at him; let him remember what strength he had against her, what power he found to carry out his will. This time, no Golbez will come to claim him.

He must remember. His gauntlets grip his spear so tightly that it ought to crack. "I’ve betrayed no one, Barbariccia. I’ve returned to my senses!"

"And you’ve grown arrogant as well, I see." Having watched Golbez retreat, he must think that humanity can stand against forces beyond its comprehension. She wonders how quickly his spine would crack once her hands wrapped around him. "I should have killed you and Rosa both when I first had the chance."

Does he believe that he has survived so far only at her whim? What she can see of his face is fixed with cold anger. His lip has scabbed over where she pierced it.

"But that old wizard of yours is gone now," she adds, "and Meteor with him. Allow me to amend my past mistakes!"

Kain's legs shift as he prepares to pounce. "I welcome you to try. You’re not the only one who can ride the wind, Barbariccia!"

Again he uses her name, as if it is enough to give him power over her. He knows nothing of names, nothing of wind, nothing at all. She is sick of words. Her cyclone catches him when he leaps, and only by a lucky twist does he avoid breaking against the floor.

The other humans have drawn their weapons to wave futility at her from below. Nothing would be simpler than to let Zot fall and crush them inside it, but Zemus burns in her head when she tries. Kill with her own hands, or not at all—perhaps he hopes to see her destroyed like Scarmiglione and Cagnazzo, now that she no longer suits his purpose.

Someday she will destroy him and feel his presence drain like pus from her flesh.

Barbariccia swoops down in a cyclone of her hair, raining lightning. Something stings her shoulder. With a growl, she tips and descends to find Rosa, who still bears the marks of chains and claws on her skin and tatters of clothing, notching an arrow to a bow.

A twitch, and Barbariccia rips the air from the woman. She falls gray as a stone, movements stiff and frantic. The humans bumble and shout. A hammer strikes the tip of her cyclone and bounces harmlessly back.

As she focuses on Cecil, Barbariccia realizes that she has lost track of Kain. He dives from above into her storm and drives his spear into her thigh. She howls and swipes him away through her shock-stilled hair, ripping open his breastplate.

By the time her cyclone is back in place, she has been battered by fist and hammer and sword. Rosa is warm and bright again, her hands alive with spells. Barbariccia slashes and burns, but her damage is undone by a steady flow of white light.

She cannot lose a battle of attrition. She cannot tire. But she does not understand how this has become such a battle, when she could so easily rip apart any one of them. One falls, another rises, another strikes, another tends, another readies; they are one warrior in five bodies.

Her blood flows out and will not stop.

The man who strikes with his metal-studded fists nearly loses his hand to her, but Rosa seals it back in place. The man with the hammer shouts and curses and falls twitching beneath a bolt of lightning, but Rosa revives him. Kain shatters the shield of her cyclone, again and again and again. Cecil's sword burns.

Her strength cannot falter, but her strength must dwell in her blood; she can feel her power pouring out around her. Her vision darkens and crackles. Gravity swallows. How did it feel for Scarmiglione when his flesh failed him?

In dilated time, she watches Rosa notch an arrow and loose it at her throat; Barbariccia's head snaps back at the impact, and all her world is the taste of her own blood.

She cannot tire, but she can fall.

In and out of nothingness, in and out of terror and relief, her mind flickers. She is formless, weightless, fleshless, perhaps no longer Barbariccia. The confused winds disperse. She is not among them. She is nothing but thoughts too stubborn to stop.

Enough sympathy lingers in the air to carry her wild laugh. She is still the vestiges of voice and ears and sight, fading like fog under a hot sun. The creatures that ruined her flesh still live; the stones around them are already collapsing without her, and their blood will mix with hers until there is no telling them apart. She tries to find comfort in this, and hates that she needs to.

She falls and falls and falls and cannot stop.


	4. Rise

The wind is not the wind.

She—"she" carries like a stubborn scent—can no longer gather up sandstorms and hurricanes. Fire is slack and silent, though she never felt the fire die. She has nothing left to feel. Air that is no longer part of her follows through and around her—her shell is gone, but an "around" remains—and she is the worst of everything, a memory of form.

These millennia have ruined her. She is aware of time. She is aware of her ruin.

The company of her kindred only worsens it. There is no revelry, no frenzy, no orgiastic abandon among them; they are set apart like stars, too distant to dream of touch. She has no whim now for sighs and zephyrs; she has no whim at all, only the frantic, impotent need to destroy.

The air she once was breathes through her. She carries frustration like smoke.

Somewhere in the mind she has been cursed with, in her horrible lingering memory of solidness, pressure creeps in. "Live," it breathes, and she is caught in a thickening panic, weighed down by fear and longing and heavier emotions that she has never understood. She chokes on them and hates that she knows what it is to choke.

"Live, and kill."

She who was the wind coalesces into meat and bone. Her craving must be fed, and in this form, at least, she is accustomed to being bound.

 

* * *

 

When she has eyes again, they open on Rubicante. He is wearing clothing again, a cloak and headpiece mottled with the same red and blue as his flesh. "You," she says, voice scraping strangely up her throat.

His smile is thin, crooked, complicated. "It has been a long time."

"You felt me end." The tremor in her voice passes down her limbs as her body curls in on itself. "No, this— _again_. No." The claws she rakes down her own arm leave erratic red trails.

A hand identical to her own catches her wrist and leaves her disoriented until it melts into a deep blue. "This again, indeed," says Cagnazzo into her ear. His laugh is short, sharp, bitter. "Our lord benefactor sustains us."

"Cruelly," adds the voice of Scarmiglione. Barbariccia does not turn her head to see him; the stench in the air and his hissing rasp tell her what she will find. "Apparently, for cruelty's sake alone."

"We'll kill him." She shakes her hair from her face and winces at the cold shine of metal all around them. "Where are we?"

"I assume," Rubicante replies, "that he has succeeded in calling down the Giant of Babil from the red moon, and we are now inside it."

Barbariccia cocks her head, but there is no angle at which he makes sense. After a long silence, Scarmiglione asks, "What has the moon to do with any of this?"

Rubicante furrows his brow. "Lord Zemus's true flesh sleeps there, along with the rest who bound us."

A startled gust blasts through his cloak and nearly costs him his helmet. Metal cracks beneath Barbariccia's clenched talons. " _What?_ "

"You hadn't realized this." Rubicante's intonation falls, and what began as a question does not end as one. "When he spoke of the moon and the mechanical giant with which he means to destroy humanity, did you not—"

"He spoke of no such things to me." Cagnazzo ripples into the shape of Golbez, albeit with an exaggerated open mouth carved into the mask, and drones, "Cagnazzo, go to Baron. Kill the king. Be the king. Kill the man with whom I am inexplicably obsessed. Oh, dear, should I have warned you of his mages?"

As he melts back into a turtle, Scarmiglione rumbles, "He spoke to me of nothing else. I have forgotten the name of the man, but not the obsession."

"Cecil." Barbariccia drags the word out on a sneer. "'Kill Cecil, because I can't. He brought a _wizard_.'"

Her head rings louder and louder until she expects it to burst from the noise and pressure. "You grow bold," Zemus whispers into the space he has hollowed out. The echoes scrape at her skull. "Do not forget that my power alone sustains you. You exist at my pleasure."

Barbariccia rises and growls at the approaching form of Golbez. Lip curled, she shouts, "Your power bound us!"

"So it did, with that of my brethren." Pale yellow light shines clearly through Golbez's eyes as if his skull is hollow; Zemus speaks, and Zemus alone. "My brethren are fools, but I wished to wipe this planet clean of the filthy creatures that have subjugated you for so long."

Contempt crackles in Scarmiglione's hisses. "And once you have washed away humanity, you would have taken the world and keep us bound for yourself."

Zemus laughs far away, and the noise that comes from Golbez is a delayed echo. One of Golbez's armored hands grips the exposed bone of Scarmiglione's jaw and effortlessly forces it shut. "You exist only to be mastered. From the moment this rock took shape, you have never been anything more than tools awaiting a strong hand."

A flick of his wrist, and Scarmiglione's bulk skids across the floor until it hits the wall. "My brethren helped to bind you," Zemus continues, voice teetering on the edge of mania, "but I alone have mastered you."

He should die slowly, impaled on the bones torn from his puppet. He should see every strip of his true flesh as it is peeled from him. Let him suffer and dread.

Cagnazzo opens his mouth, but Rubicante hastens to speak first: "For what purpose have you revived us?"

"Cecil comes. Kill him."

Zot crashed for nothing. Barbariccia scoffs. "He still lives? You command a force to obliterate all of humanity, yet you cannot destroy a single man?"

Golbez's fist seizes her throat and hurls her face-first to the floor. Zemus waits until she raises her head to reply, "The same man killed each of you. Improve upon your previous performances, or I shall find you of no further use."

With a shimmer like the sun on the sea, Cagnazzo shifts into Cecil's likeness. Grinning wider than his new mouth should allow, he wiggles his fingers as if casting a spell. "Boo. Shouldn't you flee in terror now?"

He hits the wall with such a crack that Barbariccia wonders if his shell has shattered.

Golbez's eyes begin to flicker between burning lights and glassy hollows. Zemus spreads himself too thin. "Enough," he says sharply. "I've an ancient weapon to command. Fail me again, and drift for all eternity in the void." The darkness of his armor fades into the darkness of a doorway, and he is gone. A blue gleam in his shadow reminds Barbariccia briefly, madly, infuriatingly of Kain.

Cagnazzo is shaken but unbroken. Their bodies are, for now, whole.

Barbariccia hovers with her elbows propped on her knees and breathes a long, frustrated sigh. "He will never free us. He will never shatter the crystals."

"Then let us kill every creature that bound us," says Scarmiglione. "The crystals may not survive the loss of that power."

Cagnazzo barks a laugh. "Shall we fly to the red moon, or drag it down to us?"

Rubicante raises a hand for silence. "Do not dismiss either as impossible. As you'll recall, Cecil and his entourage did succeed in killing us all; we might learn from such tactics."

After a dubious silence, Cagnazzo briefly takes the shape of an old man in bright robes, face half-hidden by dark glasses and white hair. "Shall we conscript a wizard, then?"

There is no hint of amusement on Rubicante's face. "They are small, fragile things that, bound together, do not break. If we combined our strength as perfectly, what could withstand us?"

Barbariccia bristles. "We tried that."

"Rather, we worked at odds with each other." Rubicante pauses, but on this point there is no dissent. "I propose that we join our powers freely and dance as once we did."

Scarmiglione's breath rattles in his throat. "We are not as we were."

"I am unwilling to accept that we can never again be." Rubicante extends his hand, and the air above distorts with heat. "Controlling the Giant requires most of his strength and attention. Let him come near the end of his destruction before we fall upon Golbez as one, and he will lack the strength to subdue us."

One cry in four mouths, sixteen limbs on one body, four forms and one frenzy. The shining beast descended from the moon; why can they not rise along the same path? Barbariccia threads her fingers through Rubicante's and burns away a memory of cold and desperation. The fetid earth covers like a landslide. The water rises up from below.

Where their hands meet, steam rises, mud drips, and the wind binds in a column. Barbariccia's hair splays around them, touching even the rotting horror of Scarmiglione. Blood resonates. They have all lived and died alone. For so long, they have not been as they were meant to be.

Flesh longs for flesh and rejoices in the chaos of reunion.

They are muddled, selfless, ecstatic, a roiling tangle of mouths and claws and quivering. Their storm builds like an echo overlapping itself, flesh upon flesh upon flesh upon flesh. This is the closest they have ever come to what they should be—ruined, half-dead, wild, spinning four times half-dead into twice alive. They are the heart imposing itself upon the metal, to beat and beat and beat and beat until the mechanical giant bursts.

Even after they disentangle, they are still together, still slick with one another and raw about the edges. Satisfaction throbs like a shared heart. Curled close, they breathe in sync until they hear the distant clatter of footsteps.

Barbariccia drifts above the floor and shakes out the damp tangle of her hair. The stale air stirs around her. "Together," she says, "let's tear the meat from their bones."

"As a prelude to greater things." Cagnazzo sloshes upright in a deepening puddle of seawater.

As Scarmiglione stretches, his horns scrape dark gashes into the floor. "The return of what should be."

"And the end of what should not." Steam billows around Rubicante's feet as he strides toward a wide platform in the middle of a narrow walkway, where blue patterns glow against the metal. "Let us await them."

"Ambush," he does not say, because he is still Rubicante. It doesn't matter; they are four minds to one purpose. Barbariccia wraps them all in her hair and hovers with them, flesh to flesh to flesh to flesh, in the darkness below the walkway.

At the arrival of footsteps, they rise and surround.

"At last you've come," says Rubicante.

The humans crackle with magic, all five of them. Only Cecil and Rosa are familiar; an old man whose beard blends into his iridescent robe rouses something unpleasant in the back of Barbariccia's mind, but the kindred can remember him collectively after he is unmade. Kain is not among them. Perhaps Kain is already dead.

Barbariccia focuses, sneers, and does not care. "The Giant cannot be stopped."

"But _you_ can!" Cagnazzo grins with all his teeth.

Scarmiglione blocks their retreat and breathes rot at their backs. "This will be your tomb."

Together they circle, a revolution in four arcs. As the humans brandish weapons, they weave one taunt from three voices:

"Our master Zemus..."

"Gifted us with life..."

"To rob you of yours!"

Then Rubicante spoils it, because he wears centuries of attempted humanity like a scar. They can quarrel about it later; for now, they dance.

Hurricane, conflagration, dust whipped fast enough to tear away a layer of skin—Barbariccia whirls them all around her in turn. Humans are nothing alone, so she builds a storm to corner one, a slender man without metal armor. He should peel apart like a ripe fruit.

"Sorry, you're not really my type," he says, and comes within a twitch of losing his head to Barbariccia's claws. He parries her next strike with a pair of swords that then bounce harmlessly against her cyclone. She whirls nearer and laughs.

Smokes flies at her from his hands. Barbariccia disperses it with her breath.

The air inside the Giant is poor for lightning, but she sparks enough to strike one of his swords. He falls stunned, muscles electrified out of his control.

"Edge!" One of the new wizards, a jangling blur of green, darts into the periphery of Barbariccia's vision. In the same instant that Barbariccia's claws at last slice the skin of her prey's chest, the air stirs against her will.

Clouds gather above and darken into a storm. They refuse to scatter. Barbariccia glimpses a shape atop them and recalls vaguely a force that used to bring its own lightning from an incomprehensible elsewhere, long ago, before she was "she," before she was blighted with memory.

Hot white pain sends her tumbling beyond the platform. By the she catches herself and spins the clumsiness from her hair, the man with the swords has been dragged away to be healed. She howls and blasts a gust through the heart of the melee, knocking Rosa and the bearded wizard off-balance.

The green one is chanting, palms cupped together. When her hands begin to rise, Barbariccia rips the air from her and watches her fall, gray and stiffening. But the spell survives; it takes the form of a fireball too swift and vast for Scarmiglione to dodge. Rubicante's cloak catches some, but not enough.

Scarmiglione is burning. When Cagnazzo's waves roll to put him out, the bearded wizard channels magic into lightning. The bolt frightens Cagnazzo into his shell and collapses the rising waters.

Every gust is a firestorm. Barbariccia cannot extinguish, only accelerate. When she feels Scarmiglione's end, the whole world cracks, and the spiral waits for them all beneath. Faster and faster they fall.

The humans rally. They fall and rise and never stay broken, never rip themselves from one another's chests. Even as Barbariccia strikes them down, again and again, they overwhelm Rubicante. Ice streaks the air, smelling less of magic than of elsewhere. Agonies overlap inside her.

Is the broken laughter hers, or Cagnazzo's? Hers now, alone; the water crackles with electricity, and she cannot breathe. She catches Cecil at last in her claws to drag him down with her, but Rosa shapes magic into a blinding white that burns like phosphorus. They are all upon her. She falls and falls and cannot rise.

They will die or Zemus will die or they will all die together. Good.

Barbariccia's body is crumbling around her. She cannot stop. Ruin swallows them all like gravity, and it will never stop.

 

* * *

 

This is the way the world ends.

The wind is a shallow breath from collapsing lungs. The fire cools and dies no matter how much he is fed. The sea is calm as a corpse. Dead things rot above and below the earth but cannot nourish him. The dance is over. Nothing sustains them.

This is the way the world dies, ruined and free.

What is left of the wind drifts aimlessly. From somewhere far away she still feels the pull of a crystal, now hopelessly out reach; how can she shatter anything when she has only the memory of substance? She hates form. She hates formlessness. For now, she and the stagnant air pass uncomprehending through each other, but only because she still remembers "around' and "through."

Everything is dying with her. She finds no comfort in spite, nor in the slow creep of oblivion. Even her lingering senses of sight and sound are fading. Soon she will be nothing but a tenuous awareness of her kindred, until that too is gone.

Familiarity and hatred flicker through the wind. An electric jolt focuses the kindred together as a shining beast descends from the outer dark. Remembrance chokes the throats they no longer have— _not again, not again_ —but of course it cannot happen again; there is nothing left of them to bind.

No longer can the wind batter the creature's metal hide. Instead she follows it down like a shadow until it settles upon a field and vomits forth its passengers. She recognizes them all; they have all destroyed her flesh.

The bearded wizard has been exchanged for Kain, whose survival taunts her. His golden hair hangs limp down his back with no breeze to animate it. She tries to weave herself through it, but she is only an empty echo.

Rosa too is still alive, still whole, no longer tattered. The wind has no teeth to sink into her skin. She cannot elicit even a shiver.

The humans behold the world with a hushed, misty-eyed joy, as if they cannot feel what is wrong with it. Perhaps they know and do not care, as long as they possess their shining beast. The Giant has stopped and Zemus must have been obliterated; time to gather their species and find a new world to ruin.

Kain is the first to scowl. "There is something ill on the air. Can you not smell it?"

"You just can't be happy, can you?" The one called Edge inhales noisily. "Smells fine to me."

Rosa raises her head and squints into the sky, eyes watering. "I feel it, as well. Something is amiss."

Frowning, the green wizard closes her eyes and clasps her hands. When she parts them, a small white creature shimmers into the space at her feet. Immediately it begins to chitter at her in a language never poured into the minds of the kindred.

When it pauses, she bites her lip and looks up at the others. "Whyt says our world is dying."

Cecil is almost amusing in his alarm: "Were we too slow to stop the Giant?"

The white thing chitters again.

"No, this is... Whyt, I don't _understand_ —Not even the king and queen?"

Edge coughs. "Hey, Rydia, can you summon something the rest of us can hear?"

The white thing bows and vanishes in a brief stir of healthy air; wherever it hails from, it brings a bubble of its reality with it. Rydia holds her hands together and raises them skyward before whirling in the clumsy human approximation of dance.

The dead air bursts outward to make space for the vast black mass of a dragon. Nothing about it belongs in this world; its eyes are stars, its scales the darkness behind closed eyelids, and its scent older and deeper than magic. There shouldn't be enough left of the wind to feel anything, but she yearns to fill those impossible wings, to spin and storm and see whether the dragon can fly with and despite her.

The wizard and the dragon face each other as equals, as if the former would not fit easily inside the latter's mouth.

"Bahamut," she says.

"Summoner." Bahamut's voice is an echo rumbling from an incomprehensible distance. "I cannot repair your world."

"What's wrong with it?" Edge demands.

The fires of Bahamut's eyes shine on a point where the wind finds herself fixed with the memory of what it is to be focused in one place. Something of her rallies; something of her is still real enough to rally.

"You have destroyed the hearts of the four elements that sustain this world," Bahamut replies. Still it looks at the kindred, who are real enough to be sensed. "Without them, this planet withers."

The humans exchange perplexed glances until Cecil says, "The crystals! What has befallen them?"

"Naught, nor do they sustain." Bahamut's great nostrils flare, and the wind is very nearly breathed. "The crystals are power without heart."

Rosa's hands press together at her chest. "Hallowed Father, we don't understand. What hearts are these? What has destroyed them?"

Bahamut's burning gaze passes to her, and the wind moves with it. The stubborn heft of memory brushes the tip of Rosa's gathered hair.

"Long ago," Bahamut says, in a voice distant in time as well as space, "life flourished against all odds on the White Planet. At the dawn of its civilization, when its creatures were scarcely even aware enough to draw the interest of my children, they stumbled upon the magic to bind the planet's harsh elements. With such power, the forces of nature could no longer keep their evolution in check. These creatures shaped the tundra, silenced the storms, raised the deep bounty of the sea, and harnessed fire against the cold."

The kindred stir with shared memory, shared beyond even the sky and the outer darkness. The earth shifts beneath Bahamut's enormous talons; dew slips down blades of grass; where Bahamut's glare falls on dry brown vegetation, a pale curl of smoke rises. The wind disturbs the petals of a wildflower.

"It is an enormous thing," Bahamut continues, "to control an elemental force. The nigh-infinite powers of the elements were focused into crystals, but the animating hearts proved too volatile and complex. The creatures of the White Planet instead fashioned minds and flesh to enslave them."

The humans shift uneasily. Cecil begins, "Then the crystals of our own world..." but does not seem to know how to finish.

Bahamut does not spare him a glance. "When through their own carelessness the imprisoned heart of the waters escaped, it slaughtered much of their population before they regained control. In fear and fury, they destroyed the living forms of the rest. They believed that their crystals' power alone was enough to maintain their planet.

"Of course, they erred in their reasoning, and the dead mass they inhabited swiftly decomposed. I do not believe that they understood what they had done, or they would have been malicious fools to bind your forces as they had their own." The dragon's body, the wind sees now, is only an eclipse of a light that could burn away worlds; its eyes, pinpricks in the shroud. "I, Bahamut, observer of all, have beheld this, and behold again."

What remains of the kindred throbs together. This world is theirs, to live or die with them. This is truth without joy or grief or spite.

Rydia speaks first, haltingly: "The Archfiends—those were our planet's hearts? I remember when the Eidolons became sorrowful, but they wouldn't tell me why."

There is a great deal of shouting, overlapping and out of sync. Amid it the wind picks out Rosa's "But we had no choice," Edge's "The planet _needs_ that guy?" and Kain's dark silence.

Cecil restores order by asking, "What can we do? They have been revived before; can we revive them again without endangering the people of the world?"

Bahamut's wings unfold like the night sky. "No action is without risk. They exist here now, but faintly. If you were to destroy the crystals of their power, this would, mayhap, sustain them in Zemus's place."

Kain stiffens. "They are here?"

"As much as they are anywhere at all." Bahamut's light shines so brightly that it is nearly solid, an anchor for fading senses. "Their endurance is remarkable, yet fast dwindling."

The humans' eyes pass through and over the places the wind feels likely to be. "And if they are sustained," Cecil asks slowly, "the fire, the wind, the water, and the very earth beneath us will be... intelligent. What devastation might they wreak?"

All cities to dust, all human flesh to ash. Let those who survive huddle again in caves, in darkness and terror, or let none survive at all.

"Whatsoever they might choose," Bahamut replies.

"Then what the hell is the point?" Edge snaps. "We save the world just so they can destroy it?"

Rosa's voice is low and tired. "Not all the world, I would venture. It's only humanity that they despise."

"Like that's any better!"

Drawing upon all the strength and memory of the kindred, the wind captures the exhalations of the humans and shapes them into vague wisps of sound: "You... dare deny..." Exhausted, she loses focus. If she had anything left with which to feel, she might be furious, or at least frustrated.

The humans collectively step away from the origin of the sound. "We are fools if we expect gratitude of them," Kain says in tight, measured tones. "They are beasts with the grudges of men. Yet I see no other choice before us."

"Rubicante never seemed to have much of a grudge," Rydia offers.

As Edge harrumphs at her, Cecil meets Bahamut's infinite eyes and says, "We need time."

Bahamut gazes back steadily. "Do you think it my place to grant you more? This world is no more mine than any other. As its champions, I leave its fate to you."

The great bulk of the dragon vanishes all at once, like a lost thought, and the dead air is sucked inward to fill the void. Not even the scent of elsewhere remains. Rydia's body sags; it must have been solely by her power that reality was tricked into finding Bahamut possible.

"I don't believe this," Cecil says quietly. Rosa's hand finds his. "Has all our struggle been in vain?"

There is a long silence, during the wind is not real enough to flit impatiently, until Edge huffs and says, "I think we should fly back to the moon, find Fusoya, and punch him."

Rydia scowls at him. "We have no time for that, and we don't even know if Fusoya was responsible."

"Then we could get him to wake up the rest of the Lunarians and so we can punch _them_."

"Enough." Rosa stares at a patch of sky; her eyes are nothing like Bahamut's, yet still the wind is fixed. "Is there no joy for you in nurture? Can you be satisfied with anything but our destruction?"

In her ruin, the wind expects never to be satisfied. The kindred stir with her and trouble the grass at Rosa's ankles.

Kain makes a short noise almost like a laugh. "Would you _bargain_ with them?"

No bargains, never again a bargain—but without Bahamut as an anchor, the kindred cannot find focus enough to shape sound. If the world were right, the wind would howl without ceasing.

"I do not believe they wish to die any more than we do." Cecil addresses the turbulence of the grass; the kindred are, at least, still almost real enough to be sensed. "It does us no good to remain here. Follow us, if you can, to the crystals."

They are only slightly more here than anywhere at all. The sliver of the universe they disturb shifts to a space between glittering mirrors that cover walls and ceiling and floor, together reflecting eight crystals into ten thousand and splitting five colors into a spectrum. The wind finds that she can feel something, after all. Proximity to her crystal chokes like smoke and memory.

Time passes, probably. The kindred fall at a curve alongside oblivion, closer and closer without ever touching.

When the wind hears footsteps, it is impossible at first to tell that they draw nearer. Her senses fade and rally, fade and rally, slower and slower like a dying heart.

"Mind the trapdoor," says Edge's voice. Sound and image echo as he and the rest approach, sidling around the most direct route. "So what now?"

Cecil stands in the center of the crystals and ripples out in reflections. The kindred focus above him, scenting the air faintly with soil and salt and soot. "This is our world as well as yours," he says to the ceiling. "Can we not exist in it together, as you sustain it and we are sustained by it in turn?"

The crystals resonate. Suspended between, the kindred are half-real, on the edge of exploding.

If the world were right, the wind and sea would scream "no" in a hurricane lasting for a thousand years. But the fire is a steady, calming heat, and the earth is heavy upon them all.

The hum of resonance bends to the wind's shaping, and she distorts it into fits and starts of speech: "You exist... upon our... backs." Her senses blur; shaping a soft piece of the world blinds and deafens her to the rest of it. "You have... no... right."

Her senses flicker back in as Rydia says, "We didn't do this to you."

Again: "You have... no right."

"We've suffered, too!" Rydia's features are set as stone; this is the face that turns itself unbowed and unblinking on gods. "The war for these crystals has left our loved ones dead and our homes in ruins. We too would be better off if you were never bound."

Brief creatures, with no sense of their own history. The fire reminds the kindred that every human ever to behold their collars is long dead. The wind cannot remember whether it is in her nature to destroy for the sake of memory, or whether revenge was an invention of her flesh. How could she? She did not always bear the burden of a memory.

"You know... nothing," the wind tells them all, human and kindred and self.

Kain's helmet is low; even if her vision were steady, she would not be able to read his face. "Indeed. I know nothing of your enslavement, nor do I know what control Zemus exerted upon your minds. I know nothing of whether you regret."

With effort that nearly exhausts her, the wind rustles his hair. He does not shiver.

"You are not as you were," he adds quietly, without malice.

Edge clears his throat. "Just so you know, Rubicante, if you still had skin on you, I'd take you on alone and win." He stares steadily at the space where the air bends. "Just so you know. But whatever you are now, it's different. I don't forgive you, but it wouldn't matter if I did."

A strange warmth suffuses the kindred. The wind wishes only to be the wind again, but the fire may always burn with the vestiges of Rubicante.

"We cannot bargain," says Rosa. "The life of the world is not ours to use as leverage, nor should it be. But I do have faith. Is destruction all you ever were? What were you, before you were bound?"

Wild and free, nameless and formless, savage and gentle. The wind had no notion of joy, because she had never known anything else. "We are... not... as we were."

Rosa's smile is too small for all the emotions tugging at it. "Perhaps it truly doesn't matter, but know that I bear you no ill will."

If the wind were still Barbariccia, she would bare the memory of her teeth. But she is tired and fading and no longer comforted by spite. "I have... no pity," she replies, a simple statement of fact, "and... accept... none of yours."

Nodding, Rosa sets her hand on Cecil's arm. "We have faith. Cecil, your sword."

The blade that emerges from his scabbard resonates like another crystal. If the kindred still had ears, they would ache.

"Here goes," Edge mutters. "Rydia, if nature eats us, I want you to know that you're the loveliest girl nature ever ate."

Her elbow strikes his side. "Hush."

The world flickers fainter and fainter. The wind is not certain she can be heard as she shapes a scarce hiss of a voice: "Des...troy."

Cecil's sword hangs suspended in the air, just above the Crystal of the Earth. A rueful smile twists his lips. "I break my word to Troia. May the Epopts grant me their pardon."

Then his muscles strain as he hefts the blade and brings it crashing down through millennia of solidness. One of the dark crystals cracks apart a split-second after. A terrible joy rips through the kindred as the earth bursts, expands, fills all the dead land with a shuddering gasp of life.

The humans wobble as the entire tower rocks upon its foundations. They breathe hard even after it stills.

"Keep going," Kain says sharply. "Hesitation worsens it."

The sword descends again and blasts the room blue with the ecstatic shattering of the waters. The kindred shudder after it, from the fading memories of wind and fire to the solid foundation of the earth. The ocean surges in the ancient dance of tides; underground springs rush like blood in the veins of the earth. Every twitch of life the kindred share, every electric glory.

The wind is a breath caught in straining lungs. Another swing, another crack, and she is everything.

 

* * *

 

The wind is not as she was.

"She" mingles deeper than salt and smoke, but the wind does not resent. They are not as they were. They are as they are, vibrant and real, unfixed in space, dancing without tiring, at long last satiable. Her storms are not eternal. She is infinitely more than storms.

Upon his back, the earth bears the creatures she remembers as humans. The wind and water bear their ships, which invite the fire inside. The kindred remember. Time and memory and language flow through them like an alien dance. Such are humans: small, fragile, brief, the minuscule particles of a storm begun before the kindred knew anything of names.

The wind is the wind is the wind is the wind, but the wind also remembers.

So easily the kindred could wipe the world blank and see what crawls next from it. If a third moon comes, they will remember; they will not toy with it before destroying it, even at the cost of themselves. Destruction is simple, and they are free to mete it out as they please.

They seldom please, however, beyond the collateral havoc when the dance turns most wild. Better to let the humans weave fascinating patterns through and upon them. The wind breathes them as they breathe her.

In the space bound with the name Fabul, they build a tower halfway to the clouds and string it with bells and harps. The wind dances through it, joyous master of all sound, or strikes its delicate trappings with lightning; she does as she pleases. This is worship, perhaps, or a distraction for her storms, or something else human that she has never understood. Fabul, too, is not as it was.

Far below, where the earth juts high and gray into her sky, the wind's whim focuses her on a human standing at the edge of a cliff. Male or female—she has nearly forgotten how to tell. Long golden hair falls in a shining banner, and she is reminded of a name, a time, a dance, a regret. Perhaps it was too long ago to be the same man now; time flows through her, but she does not care to chop it into pieces.

So easily she could steal the breath from him, or blast him from the edge with a gust. The earth will dance with her if she wishes to crush and bruise with whirling stones. So fragile. She does as she pleases.

Elsewhere, the wind spins her cyclones. Here she is a zephyr on a face and a sigh through hair.


End file.
